The Fantom Foundation, the organization behind the Fantom decentralized network, recently announced the creation of a new foundation for facilitating the launch of their new, upcoming Sonic chain.
On May, 23, Fantom Foundation CEO Michael Kong announced the new foundation on the blockchain network’s blog. Kong wrote:
“Our team is steadfast in exploring how the Sonic chain can impact and elevate a number of different DeFi and real-world use cases. Industries and applications such as real-world assets, perpetual DEXs, payments, trading, and high-transaction-based games, can be transformed by the speed and high throughput of Sonic.”
Fantom’s Sonic Foundation will be tasked with overseeing Sonic’s governance, managing the network treasury, orchestrating partnerships, and developing the DApp ecosystem.
According to Kong and the Fantom development team, Sonic will consist of a new layer-1 solution and a built-in layer 2 that bridges the EVM-compatible network directly to the Ethereum network.
Through the Sonic Chain’s architecture, users of the upcoming Sonic network will reportedly be able to tap into Ethereum’s vast ecosystem of decentralized applications, liquidity providers, and community.
Originally launched in 2019, Fantom offers a unique consensus model called Lachesis that deviates from traditional blockchain networks through the use of directed acyclic graphs and asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance (aBFT).
A visual demonstrating the difference between a traditional blockchain and a directed acyclic graph. Source: Central Blockchain Council of America and Fantom Foundation.
Related: Fantom bets on ‘safer memecoins’ with launch of $6.5M dev fund
Validators on the Fantom network need not work on the most current block, like in Bitcoin or Ethereum, but instead work on independently validating transactions and blocks on their own, which are known as “event blocks.”
These event blocks are then broadcast to other nodes in a non-linear fashion to achieve consensus that does not rely on blocks being ordered and validated sequentially.
Once a majority of the nodes agree on the contents of the event block, it is added to Fantom’s main chain as a root event block. Fantom’s main chain is an actual blockchain, while the consensus mechanism between nodes is a directed acyclic graph that facilitates constant asynchronous communication between all the validator nodes.
The Fantom Foundation explained that this use of asynchronous messaging between the nodes is what allows Fantom to have a finality time of 1-2 seconds per block.
