Defi Llama recently reported that the total value locked on the Fantom blockchain had exceeded $10 billion. Now takes the no.3 spot after surpassing BSC, Avalanche and Solana. With this huge surge in value, many investors are keen to predict the future affects on FTM price.
Over the recent period, thanks to its prudent plans in 2021, FTM has captured the spotlight. Fantom is a highly scalable public chain platform based on DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph), a technology that has made transactions much faster and cheaper. The public chain is 15 to 300 times faster than Ethereum in terms of transactions, and the fees have also been lowered from dozens of dollars to less than $0.1.
Fantom, powered by the Lachesis protocol, uses the asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant (aBFT) consensus algorithm. Lachesis is a highly scalable protocol that ensures fast speeds and improved security in the Fantom network. The blockchain environment built by Fantom is called Opera, an EVM-compatible platform that supports smart contracts written in Solidity (Ethereum’s programming language). Opera is thus fully compatible with EVM and makes it easier for Ethereum developers to migrate their applications onto Fantom.
Driven by the public chain’s first-rate technologies, many Ethereum projects have been migrated to Fantom. Plus, the Fantom Foundation has also empowered the development of many Fantom-native applications, which facilitated the exponential growth of the Fantom ecosystem in the latter half of 2021.
For example, many leading DeFi projects, including SushiSwap, Curve, and Cream, have been gradually migrated to Fantom. Fantom-native projects supported by the Fantom Foundation like SpookySwap, SpiritSwap, Grim Finance, Scream, and Tomb Finance have also become a major part of the Fantom ecosystem.
The Fantom Foundation announced an incentive program of 370 million FTM at the end of last August. To be more specific, a project team can apply for rewards from the Foundation if the TVL of its protocol stays above the time-weighted average of $5 million or $100 million for an extended period of time. This incentive program has helped Fantom attract more developers and protocols to its ecosystem, facilitate the growth of existing protocols, and discover more valuable applications.
Backed by first-class technologies and strong financial support, the Fantom-powered applications have achieved rapid growth. Among the Fantom-native projects, the decentralized exchange platforms SpookySwap (BOO) and SpiritSwap (SPIRIT), the decentralized lending platform Scream (SCREAM), and the decentralized investment platform Beethoven X (BEETS) have all reached $200 million in terms of TVL. Recently, veDAO (WeVE) and 0xDAO (OXD), two innovative pilot projects on Fantom, have also received market-wide attention, with the TVL peaked at $2 billion and $3.85 billion, respectively.
Through efforts made in 2021, Fantom has gradually become the center of attention in the crypto market. In the space of 12 months, the number of unique addresses on the blockchain has soared from 5,084 to 1.5 million, a nearly 300x increase. During the same period, its TVL has also skyrocketed, going from less than $3 million in April 2021 to $12.27 billion today, a growth of over 4,000 times. The FTM price has grown from $0.027 a year ago to $2.132 (as of January 24), an almost 100x increase, making it one of the most well-performing projects in terms of the return on investment (ROI) in the crypto market last year.
Fantom’s TVL has now reached $12.27 billion, next only to Ethereum and Terra. Despite this, FTM’s market cap is lower than that of many other public chain projects, including BSC, AVAX, NEAR, SOL, and MATIC, which rank behind it in terms of TVL. Among all Layer 1 projects, compared to its TVL ranking, the market cap of FTM ranks poorly.
Earlier, CoinEx listed a number of outstanding Fantom-based tokens, such as FTM and BOO. Recently, the exchange has also listed many more trending tokens in the Fantom ecosystem, covering Beets, Spirit, Scream, WeVE, and OXD. As the capital market devotes more attention to Layer 1 projects, promising projects that are undervalued will be fully explored. Meanwhile, Fantom and the projects in its ecosystem will also receive more attention from institutional and individual investors.
