What is Fantom (FTM) and why should I be interested?

While many cryptocurrencies simply aspire to be profitable investments, Fantom has a much more ambitious vision. I am fascinated by how this project has positioned itself as a complete ecosystem specifically designed for decentralized applications, although lately its performance leaves much to be desired with a fall of 45% in the last month.

The Fantom Foundation promotes its creation as a “high-performance smart contract platform”, but does it really deliver on its promises? Its structure is based on the Opera chain, a directed acyclic graph network compatible with the Ethereum virtual machine. This allows for the execution of existing contracts and interaction with the Ethereum ecosystem, which sounds convenient in theory.

The Lachesis consensus mechanism seems particularly interesting to me: a leaderless Proof of Stake system that uses ABFT validation. They promise to finalize transactions in seconds, not minutes, although with the recent migration to Sonic, I wonder if they will maintain this technical advantage.

Each application on Fantom operates on its own blockchain, with customized tokens and rules, forming what they call “a network of networks”. The FTM token is used to reward validators, make transactions, and grant governance rights.

However, I cannot ignore that FTM has lost almost 14% of its value in the last week. I question whether these technical innovations are enough to compete in such a saturated market. Do we really need another smart contract platform when there are so many established alternatives? The migration to Sonic could be a desperate attempt to revitalize a project that is losing traction.

Fantastic on paper, but the reality of the market seems to tell another story.