Fantom

Founded in early 2018, Fantom is a Level 1 smart-contracting platform aiming to deliver cheap, rapid, and secure transactional capacities to network participants. Incorporated in the Cayman Islands with ongoing operations in South Korea, Fantom Foundation is the entity repsonsible for the development of Fantom. The project was founded by computer scientist Dr. Ahn Byung Ik, and the Foundation's chief executive officer is Michael Kong. At the heart of Fantom's mission is building a scalable, accessible platform for the blockchain users of tomorrow with ever-increasing demands. Various shortcomings have become evident in recent years with both proof-of-work (PoW) and proof-of-stake (PoS) architectures–energy consumption & slow transactions for the former, and reduced security & decentralization with the latter. This necessitates further innovation in distributed consensus mechanisms, which is key to Fantom's unique selling proposition.

The Fantom Foundation has built a new model for reaching a consensus on transactions called the Lachesis consensus engine (or Lachesis protocol). It uses a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) based algorithm to achieve asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance (aBFT). Lachesis has four key qualities:

Fantom has implemented Lachesis as a consensus layer that can extend to additional layers within the system. The Fantom ecosystem may eventually consist of multiple blockchain layers with Lachesis at the core. The first additional layer within Fantom was Opera, an EVM-compatible smart contract platform that launched in December 2019. Opera is a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) layer whose validator set uses Lachesis to validate transactions and produce new blocks. It now features several decentralized finance (DeFi) applications, including SushiSwap and Curve.

In May 2019, Fantom announced that it would partner with Binance Chain to improve interoperability through the creation of a multi-asset and cross-chain ecosystem. This multi-asset initiative would introduce various new token standards to Fantom, including Fantom versions of Ethereum's ERC-20 and Binance Chain's BEP-2. These standards set the stage for integrating popular Ethereum applications on Opera in early 2021. Opera is an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible blockchain which can also be integrated with Cosmos SDK. The project's standardized tokens (representing FTM) trade on several major Level 1 networks, made possible by various bridges.

The Fantom Foundation turned its focus following the mainnet launch towards DeFi use cases with the help of Yearn Finance founder Andre Cronje, who served until March 2022 as a technical advisor to Fantom. Andre has advised and helped promote Fantom's multi-chain efforts, such as the launch of Fantom's bridge to Ethereum. The project continues to make strides in the space following his departure, though the event resulted in significant FTM market volatility in the month. However, as Fantom continues to advance as a now-mature project, powering itself an ecosystem of dozens of applications and integrations that push the boundaries of smart contract flexibility whilst pursuing cost-effective performance.