Photo by: Route 2 FI
Compiled by: TechFlow
The Fantom Opera network and the ecosystem built on it has changed a lot since the rally in 2021. Let’s take a look at what they have built during the bear market, the current narrative, and all the opportunities for the $FTM ecosystem going forward.
Some quick $FTM stats as of February 16, 2023:
- Price: $0.56
- Market capitalization: $1.5 billion
-ATH: $3.46 (-83%)
-ATL: $0.0019 (+29,500%)
Fantom has attracted the attention of many DeFi speculators in 21 years. It is one of my favorite chains because it is very simple, cheap, fast and stable to use.
In 2022, Fantom has a new researcher: Professor Bernhard Scholz. He has been studying the execution, security, and performance of smart contracts. Looking for ways to increase the speed and scalability of the network.
Another familiar face has also publicly returned to the Fantom Foundation team (even though he may have never left the background): Andre Cronje.
The ecosystem is not standing still either, the Fantom Ecosystem Treasury has been launched to help projects obtain funding in their efforts to build innovative dApps on Fantom.
At this year’s Quantum Miami conference, the Fantom Foundation had some bigger news: FVM.
The Fantom virtual machine is the Foundation's upgrade to Ethereum's EVM.
They announced FVM in February, and from test results they estimated 4,500 transactions per second with a block finality time of around 1 second.
Another interesting thing Andre Cronje introduced was that in Q2/Q3 of this year they will be launching something called “Gas Subsidy” which will allow users to join and use DeFi protocols without needing $FTM tokens as Gas in their wallets.
This is a step in the right direction as it will make it easier for beginners to try DeFi.
According to Nansen, Fantom is one of the top chains in terms of number of active addresses. I think this number will increase if DeFi takes off again.
But what really made Fantom explode again was this news shared by Andre Cronje last November.
To summarize: "November 2022 — >$450,000,000 in FTM, >$100,000,000 in stablecoins, >$100,000,000 in crypto assets, and $50,000,000 in non-crypto assets. Salary burn rate is $7,000,000/year. We have about 30 years left (without touching FTM). "
In other words: Fantom is cash flow positive and can operate for another 30 years without having to sell its $FTM tokens.
The news couldn’t have come at a better time. At the time, $FTM was trading at $0.18, but it rose by nearly 40% in the following days.
Now that the tech-related stuff is out of the way, it’s time to get into the on-chain projects and how things are changing.
Phantom DeFi：
These stats from DeFiLama showing the total TVL on all chains may look depressing but remember we are in a bear market and most tokens are down (75-95% from ATH).
$FTM now has a TVL of $535M (ATH of $7.5B) and is competing with Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, Arbitrum, Binance Smart Chain, and others.
SpookySwap remains the most notable DEX in the $FTM space, with many using it for swapping, or using the new cross-chain swap feature integrated with Axelar. This allows users to swap BNB directly from the Binance chain to the Fantom chain.
It allows you to connect to a new chain without having to worry about gas fees.
Do you remember Solidly? It was heavily hyped, Solidly attracted a lot of liquidity to Fantom, but it failed.
With some minor tweaks in the code, it became a massive fork protocol on other chains, and eventually, a new competitor emerged on Fantom — Equalizer. So far, it has driven an insane amount of transactions.
Beethoven X — Still going strong (largest DEX after Spooky), but with the hype of the Solidly fork, Equalizer gaining a lot of traction and their cross-chain , it hasn’t gotten as much attention as it did in 2021 and 2022.
After the success of the perpetual DEX GMX, it was only a matter of time before a perpetual DEX appeared on $FTM.
$MMY — the first perpetual DEX on $FTM, has grown rapidly since launch, exceeding everyone’s initial expectations.
Morphex ($MPX) — A new project that was recently launched has received a lot of attention due to the developer (Morpheus) being very popular in the Fantom community.
They have some new features coming soon and will be launching the platform in late February.
On top of that we have OG protocols like Tarot Finance and Liquid Driver coming to cross-chain soon, as well as huge returns available on Thena.
I won’t be taking out any yield farm recommendations in this bear market environment, but you can find them through Nanoly.
Personally, the DeFi protocols I’m most interested in right now are: $EQUAL, $MMY, and $MPX.
To summarize, why I am bullish on $FTM:
-Andre Cronje is back
- Stable cash flow
- FVM
-Gas Subsidy
-Easier to join DeFi
-FTM Ecological Vault
- Known as one of the most Degen chains in terms of DeFi speculation