Fantom isn’t actually a real blockchain, but a DAG-based smart contract platform with 3 blockchains.
DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) is not a real chain, but a graph, and Fantom does not centralize all the processing power on a single decentralized ledger, allowing even the users of its ecosystem to implement their own independent networks.
The result is a decentralized, permissionless and open source, high performance, scalable, customizable and secure platform for smart contracts, designed to overcome the limitations of previous generation blockchains.
It uses a new aBFT consensus mechanism, Lachesis, which allows it to be faster and cheaper than previous technologies, but at the same time secure.
The key point is precisely this, enabling large amounts of fast and inexpensive transactions without sacrificing security and decentralization.
Moreover, its modular architecture allows the complete customization of the blockchain for digital assets, with different features tailored to the specific use cases.
The project raised nearly $40 million with an ICO completed in June 2018, and its ERC20 FTM token debuted on the trading markets in October 2018.
Initially it was traded at $0.015, but it experienced a brief spike that brought it to a high of $0.027 on November 1st, 2018.
Since then the price first dropped, hitting a first low at just over $0.003 in February 2019, and then rose to a new high of $0.038 in January 2019.
Afterwards the price fell for several months, reaching a new absolute low of just over $0.002 during the collapse of the financial markets in mid-March 2020, but has now recovered enough to go from $0.005 on July 1st to $0.012 on July 3rd, 2020.
The recent spike could be the result of the announcement that OKB, the utility token of the OKEx exchange, will become part of Fantom’s DeFi ecosystem as it will be used as collateral to open Collateralized Debt Positions (CDP) on Fantom Finance, thus obtaining loans in stablecoins on fiat currencies such as USD, EUR, etc..
The ultimate goal is to develop a programmable platform based on distributed ledgers with an asynchronous Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism, integrated with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and the Web3JS stack.
This will allow users to write, compile and distribute smart contracts on Fantom exactly as they do on Ethereum.
Transactions will generally be confirmed within 1 or 2 seconds, with the possibility to support a large number of nodes in an open source permissionless environment, and the FTM token can be staked, used for on-chain governance, and as payment for network fees.
According to the official roadmap the platform should be usable by the end of 2020, and many of the steps planned for the first half of this year have been completed.
