A Fantom Thesis.
The L1 rotation is gaining momentum, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. Fantom is an innovative PoS chain with the strongest multichain community in DeFi 🐸 and a unique consensus mechanism enabling it to potentially have the fastest finality out of any L1 by far.

danielesesta and @ndreCronjeTech helped drive Avax’s massive boom, and now they’re shifting their focus to Fantom. FTM is in a similar position to NEAR as one of the emerging L1s with huge untapped potential.

Fantom has Avalanche’s speed, gas costs, and EVM-compatibility, Solana’s parallel tx processing, Terra’s stablecoin-focused DeFi engine ($SPELL) + a hardcore community and multichain focus. Going to be hard to beat.

Advantages:1. Most undervalued L1 on a Market Cap/TVL basis by a wide margin, 6th highest TVL overall

2. Set up to have the FASTEST FINALITY out of all L1s (currently 1s), w/ projected 300k TPS in future

3. Lachesis: unique DAG-based aBFT consensus -> parallel tx processing

4. EVM-compatible Opera Mainnet

5. DeFi powerhouse + aggressive multichain strategy

6. @cosmos-SDK-compatible

7. $1.1B ecosystem fund for devs

8. More than 2x the amount of DeFi dApps than Solana, and 9x Luna9. Native Fluid Staking model + On-chain governance

Metrics:

Fantom has 350k MAU, having grown 294x in the past year of unique addresses and dev activity just overtook AVAX. Daily tx count in uptrend since mid-Dec, now at 700k like AVAX.

FTM is recovering ATHs and still seems ridiculously cheap using comps analysis. Market Cap : TVL ratio of 1.2 is crazy.

Time To Finality is more important than TPS, and FTM could have the fastest TTF of all L1s. TPS deals with averages, but in reality txs aren’t confirmed linearly WHILST a block is being processed - it looks more like a step-wise function.

TTF measures speed more accurately.
FTM’s deterministic, near-instant finality puts it in a league above other L1s as most employ probabilistic Nakamoto Consensus. For Eth this requires waiting ~25 txs to fully confirm.

This is made possible through Lachesis: FTM’s leaderless, DAG-based (Directed Acyclic Graph) aBFT (asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant) consensus mechanism. Instead of linearly executing blocks, Fantom nodes independently ‘gossip events’ back-and-forth until consensus is reached by a supramajority.

Unlike Ethereum, Fantom’s multi-threaded architecture removes single-node capacity bottlenecks and allows it to truly scale with Moore’s Law (like Solana).

“If Ethereum is a decentralized computer, Fantom is a network made of potentially infinite decentralized computers.” Or so Fantom claims. Hot take: “Deterministic and fast finality protocols are limited in terms of number of validators.”

EVM Compatibility: In the face of the Great Alt-EVM wars where everything can and will be forked, the most defensible moats are community and multi-chain integrations. Fantom has positioned itself as one of the L1s most likely to come out on top.

Most aggressive multi-chain expansion strategy:Fantom knows that bridges + yields worked for Avax. With multi-chain dApps, integrated bridges to 30+ L1s, and Fantom as the centerpiece, you can be sure as hell they’re coming for your TVL.

FTM plans on being a new homebase for the multi-chain deployment strategy of blue-chips such as $YFI, $SPELL, $CRV, $SUSHI, $ICE etc.
FTM is Cosmos SDK-compatible, meaning Fantom dApps could interoperate with Cosmos app-specific chains like @Terra_Money and @OsmosisZone.

DeFi stablecoin engine:

The stablecoin wars will trigger the explosion of yield farming, lending/borrowing, and leveraged cross-chain finance on FTM, powered by @MIM_SPELL.

The positive feedback loops created by Andre and Daniel’s blue-chip suite of DeFi products reminds me of the core DeFi logos which thrust @terra_money and UST into glory. Crypto is a contact sport, and boy does @AndreCronjeTech know how to box.

- AAVE $FTM integration

- Felix, Fantom’s Binance-powered hybrid CEX/DEX, is coming early Q1 which will finally give retail access to FTM's ecosystem & provide a ton of liquidity

- US CEX Listings

- Artion v2 (NFTs)

- Fantom Name Service

Tokenomics:Initial allocation 53% to insiders, has been diluted over time but still v high.

Release schedule of $FTMAll tokens to team/backers have already finished vesting. With 80% of total supply already circulating, there is little inflationary/sell pressure! Only FTM being released is from staking rewards.

Fantom has ambitious plans, but we are not there yet. Fantom claims 4k TPS and <$0.0001 gas costs. In reality, FTM has ~13.3 TPS (even with blocks nearly empty), and gas costs are closer to Optimism levels of ~$0.25 (even for a simple SpookySwap trade).

Did FTM steal Hedera’s DAG-based model? Maybe. They certainly built off their gossip/hashgraph patent which is now licensed under MLA, but the legality is a grey area considering it was initially open-sourced. HBAR is now more enterprise blockchain focused.

The truth is Fantom is currently the least decentralized major L1. I am a FTM bagholder, so please know that I have best intentions at heart here. Only 51 active validators, of which 3 could collude to hijack the network (33%+).

Sure, investors have shown they simply don't care (BNB). But to get listed on US exchanges and achieve legitimacy within the crypto-native community, FTM must decentralize. Won’t be easy, but very do-able.