A lot has changed since the parabolic run in 2021, for the Fantom Opera network and the ecosystem built on top of it.
Fantom is one the oldest smart contract chains after $ETH, operating for 4 years with 99.99% uptime.
Long-term followers of my content may remember that I’ve written threads about $FTM in both 2021 and 2022, but since the last thread, there have been some major upgrades in the works.
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The Bull Case For Fantom
It’s time to look at the bull case for Fantom.
If you want to look at my earlier Fantom threads, you can find them here:
In this thread, I will go through what Fantom has been doing in the bear market, what’s new, and of course, look through the current DeFi opportunities.
First some quick $FTM stats:
As of February 16th, 2023:
-Price = $0.56
-Mcap = $1.5b
-Proof of Stake
-ATH: $3.46 (-83%)
-ATL: $0.0019 (+29,500%)
Fantom captured the attention of many DeFi degens, and it was among my favorite chains due to how easy, cheap, fast, and stable it was to use.
It became incredibly popular during the DeFi summer of 2021 and until it peaked in March 2022 when the bear market really started.
What’s New For The Fantom Network?
In 2022 Fantom got a new research officer: Professor Bernhard Scholz.
He has been working on smart-contract execution, security, and performance. Finding ways to increase the speed and scalability of the network.
Another familiar face also returned publicly to the Fantom Foundation team (although he likely never left behind the scenes) - Andre Cronje the “father of DeFi”.
The news of his return kicked off Fantom’s late 2022 with much excitement.
It does not stop at just having some new (and returning) names - The Fantom ecosystem vault was launched, with the goal of helping projects secure funding in their efforts to build innovative dApps on Fantom.
At the Quantum Miami conference this year the Fantom foundation had some even bigger news: FVM.
The Fantom Virtual machine is the foundation's upgrade to Ethereum's EVM. They unveiled it in February and looking at the test results, they are estimating 4500 transactions per second with block finality at approximately 1 second.
Another interesting thing that Andre Cronje presented was that in Q2/Q3 this year they will launch something called “Gas subsidies”, which allows users to onboard and use DeFi protocols without needing $FTM for gas in their wallets. This is a step in the right direction as this will make trying DeFi easier for beginners.
According to Nansen, $FTM is one of the top chains ranked in terms of the number of active addresses. A number I think will increase if DeFi season kicks off again.
Fantom Gaining Popularity
But what really kicked off’s Fantom’s popularity again was when Andre Cronje in November last year shared this:
Summarized it said: "Nov 2022 — Over 450,000,000 $FTM, > $100,000,000 in stables, > $100,000,000 in crypto assets, $50,000,000 in non-crypto assets. Salary burn rate $7,000,000 / year. We have ~30 years left (without having to touch FTM)"
In other words: Fantom is cash flow positive and can operate for another 30 years without selling off their own $FTM tokens.
The news couldn’t have come at a better time. $FTM was sitting at $0.18, but increased by almost 40% in the coming days. People were starting to believe in Fantom again.
Also, if you want to read more about the updates and evolvement of Fantom, check out this good thread:
Now that the tech-related stuff is out of the way, it’s time to get into the projects on-chain and how things have changed.
Fantom DeFi
These stats from DeFiLlama shows total TVL for all chains and might look depressing AF, but remember that we’re in a bear market and that most tokens are down (75-95% from ATH).
$FTM is now sitting at a $530M TVL ($7.5B at ATH) and is competing with Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, Arbitrum, Binance Smart Chain, etc.
DeFi Protocols On Fantom
SpookySwap is the most notable DEX in the $FTM space still, with many using it for either swap or due to easy integrations of both multichain bridge and the new cross-chain swap feature from Axelar - This allows users to swap say BNB straight to Fantom from the Binance chain to the fantom chain. Allowing you to bridge to a new chain and not have to worry about how you are going to get gas onto it.
SpiritSwap - Also mentioning this because I was a huge fan in early 2022. However, while exciting news was seen when they announced V2 last year, the excitement was short-lived and compared to other dexes it has fallen short. Let’s see if they will release some exciting news going forward.
Do you remember Solidly? It was massive hype around it and Solidly caused a wild amount of liquidity to come to Fantom.
Solidly caused a massive amount of liquidity to come to Fantom, but due to some assumptions made, it failed. With some small tweaks to the code, it became a massively forked protocol on other chains, and eventually, a new contender arose on Fantom - Equalizer, they have pushed some crazy volume numbers for being so young in the space.
To learn more about Equalizer, check out this thread:
Beethoven - Still going strong (next biggest DEX after Spooky), but with the hype being on Solidly forks, and Equalizer getting much of the attraction + them moving cross-chain, it is not getting as much attention as in 2021 and 2022.
After the success of the perpetual dex $GMX, it was only a matter of time until perp dexes were available on $FTM too.
Mummy( $MMY) - The first perp dex on $FTM, has seen rapid growth since launch, outperforming everyone's initial expectations.
Morphex ($MPX )- The newest one to launch, much excitement for this one as the dev (Morpheus) is beloved in the Fantom community. They have some new features coming out soon, with a platform launch in the second half of February. Thread about MPX here:
Other than that we have OG protocols like @TarotFinance and @LiquidDriver going cross-chain & getting huge rewards on Thena; Velodrome etc. @WigoSwap is coming up the ranks building community. @ByteMasons $OATH smashing it too.
In the current bear market environment I won’t come up with any recommendations for yield farms, etc., but you can always find them yourself by using Nanoly
Personally, I’m most excited about the DeFi protocols: $EQUAL, $MMY, and $MPX.
Just to summarize this thread on why it makes sense to be bullish on $FTM:
Andre Cronje is back
Solid cashflow: 30-year runaway
FVM
Gas subsidies
Easier onboarding to DeFi
FTM ecosystem vault
Known as one of the most degen chains in terms of DeFi opportunities
Thank you for reading!
See you next week :)
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Great article as ever, good job mate!