Exchange Fantom (FTM)

Fantom is a directed acyclic graph smart contracts platform for developers that provides them with access to build and use dApps. It was created to overcome the main difficulties contemporary blockchains that offer smart contracts face, such as low levels of scalability, slow transactions, and high transaction fees. The developers of the Fantom state that they managed to reduce the transaction time to 2 sec. The platform uses its own bespoke consensus mechanism, which is modified and developed by the Fantom project team using a version of the Proof-of-Stake.

The network was launched by the Fantom Foundation and created in 2018 by a computer scientist from South Korea Dr. Ahn Byung Ik. According to the official platform, the members of the project team are spread around the globe.

The mainnet of the project called OPERA was launched at the end of 2019 as another alternative to Ethereum. It proclaimed the ambitious goal to combine decentralization, security, and scalability. To be able to offer that, Fantom has a set of tools that are meant to help in integrating existing dApps with Fantom. 

Opera is an application development layer. It is compatible with Ethereum Virtual Machine. The biggest vision of the project’s team is to provide the overall compatibility between all the chains and transaction bodies. Thanks to Opera and the support of the Solidity programming language it provides, Fantom offers a full set of smart contract capabilities, so the users can interact with Ethereum while using Fantom and benefit from its advantages. 

To facilitate the dApps on the network, the project team has built its own consensus mechanism from scratch, together with a consensus layer called Lachesis. It is an Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant (aBFT) consensus, providing security for Layer 1 and the other layers of the ecosystem as well. It also grants the fast speed of the transactions. 

As per developers, the Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism that the project uses creates more freedom on the network, as there are no leaders or winners, and even no competition. The nodes can enter and exit the market at any moment. Moreover, validators don’t decide which blocks are valid and can be added to the network. 

The Fantom network can process thousands of transactions in a second, while one transaction takes just a few seconds and the fees are no more than a few cents. Thus, Fantom offers the possibility of scalability at a lower cost. 

The native coin of the project is FTM. The token serves as a measure of value on the network, moreover, it also provides governance rights. Each token is equal to one vote and the users can express their agreement or disagreement on a scale from 0 to 4. The FTM token can be staked for up to 15% APY. The FTM coin has a total supply of 3.1 billion with around 2.1 billion in current circulation.