In the past few days, the veteran public chain Fantom has attracted the attention of the community. Amid the correction of Bitcoin and Ethereum the day before, and the general decline in the market, Fantom rose by more than 30% in a week, and FTM rose by 146.2% in the past month.
Founder AC’s passionate publicity
Fantom’s resurgence is inseparable from Andre Cronje, director of the Fantom Foundation. AC was the DeFi OG in the last bull market, creating star projects such as Yearn Finance and Phantom, as well as many important projects such as Keep3r Network, Multichain, Chainlist, Solidly and Bribe. Prolific contributor to crv Finance.
Andre Cronje announced his withdrawal from the encryption field in March 22, but according to The Block, Andre Cronje actually never left Fantom. Andre Cronje's exit and the news that he was "returning" to Fantom both played an important role in stimulating the price changes of FTM at the time.
In recent months, Andre Cronje has frequently released "good news" about the progress of the Fantom ecosystem, which has also greatly increased investors' expectations for FTM.
On January 9, Andre Cronje stated on social media that Fantom had successfully solved the state inflation problem in the blockchain, which was one of the core milestones of the project since its early days. State inflation refers to the situation where the storage space required by the blockchain continues to increase over time when processing and storing transaction and smart contract data, resulting in an increase in storage costs and a decrease in processing efficiency.
According to reports, Fantom adopts aBFT (Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance) consensus mechanism, which does not require the longest chain rule. Once more than two-thirds of the validators know the previous state, all data before reaching that state can be pruned. This means that all data older than two epochs can be pruned.
Fantom also introduces new database technology Carmen, which uses flat storage instead of tree or dictionary structures, and further significantly reduces the current enabled state bloat while maintaining a cryptographic signature of the world state. After using the above technology, Fantom's state storage requirements will be reduced from approximately 2TB to 60GB.
The day before yesterday, Andre Cronje used a meme to promote Fantom, saying that Fantom Sonic will bring better performance than the parallel EVM path. This move attracted friendly questioning from Jay, the founder of the new public chain Sei, and Toly, the founder of the old public chain Solana, but it also led to a 20% increase in FTM prices.
What is it about Fantom Sonic that places expectations on it?
On October 25, 2023, the Fantom Foundation announced the launch of its latest technology upgrade, Fantom Sonic, aimed at improving the scale and performance of the network. The new upgrade includes a new virtual machine, enhanced database storage and an optimized consensus mechanism.
According to reports, Fantom Sonic will replace the previous Opera technology stack and does not require a hard fork to upgrade. Fantom Sonic will enable more than 2,000 transactions per second, with an average finalization time of one second and a fraction of the storage requirements of its predecessor, Opera.
Fantom Sonic's test network has been running for 5 months and has shown good performance in all aspects of token transactions and transmission, as well as withstanding traffic pressure.
In addition to regular on-chain operation tests, Fantom Sonic also created a maze game, which was launched in an interesting interactive form to allow dApp developers to experience the performance effects after the upgrade.
The official release of Fantom Sonic is planned for the spring of 2024, which is one of the important developments that the Fantom community and even the DeFi community are looking forward to in 2024. When DeFi researcher Ignas shared the ecosystem he was concerned about, he mentioned that "the fun will begin when the Fantom 2.0 Sonic upgrade is launched early next year."
The purpose of pursuing performance is to bring a richer and more prosperous project ecosystem to Fantom. Although the performance results cannot be finally verified, Fantom Sonic has opened up space for the Fantom community to look forward to.
Previously, some people's impression of the Fantom ecosystem was that only DEX and meme were active. Under AC's tweet the day before yesterday, someone asked, "What do you think is the killer application that can support Fantom's rapid growth? Don't tell I am a meme.” AC expressed its firm confidence in Fantom Sonic in a long reply:
Just as it is impossible to build modern large-scale applications today with the technology of 1990, it is also impossible to build a richer ecosystem with today's blockchain technology.
In his view, by reducing costs (using supersets, off-chain zero-knowledge computing, and parallel execution) while increasing throughput, Fantom Sonic will make gaming, social networking, and streaming media applications truly feasible on Fantom.
Just a month ago, Fantom announced the five winning projects of the Sonic Labs Entrepreneurship Accelerator Program, namely Lynx, a sustainable DEX project that supports any token as collateral, social protocol Thunder Dome, P2P lending platform Dēbita, and green technology start-ups. KiriCoin and the RPG chain game Froqorion. The community is also waiting to see whether Fantom Sonic can make these projects stand out in their respective fields?
Different from 2021, today’s public chain narrative has reached the point of involution. Whether Fantom with the blessing of AC can achieve greater glory still needs to wait for time to verify.
