AC return to open a new plan, Fantom ushered in a turning point

At the end of the year, the long-quiet Fantom has made a big move recently. Andre Cronje (AC), who once made Fantom famous in November, announced his return to Fantom.Then on December 1st, the Fantom Foundation released the Dapp Gas monetization plan to reduce the destruction rate of FTMS. Combined with the progress of Fantom virtual machine (FVM) introduced on the official blog on November 22nd, Fantom hopes to regain its momentum in the coming 2023 and return to its formerposition as the layer1 leader.

Current status of Fantom and current problems

The ecological development of Fantom has witnessed explosive growth in the past year. However, with Andre Cronje’s retirement at the beginning of the year and the depressed investment sentiment in the crypto bear market, Fantom also experienced its darkest moment, among which TVL dropped from the highest 11.81 billion dollars to the current 1.06 billion dollars. With a decline of 91%.

In addition, Ethereum Layer2 have been introduced for public chains that were originally incompatible with EVM, such as: Near launched Aurora, Polkadot launched Moonbeam, Evmos on Cosmos, Neon on Solana, etc. At present, mainstream public chains are basically compatible with EVM. Facing the emerging public chains, Fantom’s advantages in public chains are constantly being drawn closer. At the same time, the disadvantages of Fantom themselves are gradually emerging. These disadvantages did not attract much attention when Fantom was making great progress. However, the Layer1 project in 2022 is basically dominated by negative colors, BNB Chain is deeply suspected of centralization, Avalanche has been exposed as a vicious competition scandal. NEAR stablecoin plan aborted, Harmony almost lost half of its life due to hacker incident, if the drawbacks of Fantom are not corrected as soon as possible, then Fantom will fall into a longer silence in the future.

Fantom’s exposed flaws:

1. Over-reliance on celebrity

Looking back on the development of Fantom, every outbreak since its launch has AC’s shadow behind it. It can be said that AC’s celebrity effect has buffed Fantom all the way to have today’s Fantom. Fantom’s success is largely due to AC’s operation strategy. After leaving AC, Fantom can no longer win the favor of investors. Since AC’s short departure last time, FTM’s market value has plummeted by nearly 90% from the peak period. If Fantom wants to win the long- term development in the future, it must get rid of the past development thinking of relying on celebrity effect,and find the catalyst to really promote its own development.

1. Lack of ecological recruitment

Fantom data performance is indeed strong,and the ecology is relatively complete.But a closer look shows that there aren’t many new programs on Fantom.Non-freshmen projects do not contribute to Fantom’s TVL. Instead,there is a sense of Peace and love between projects rather than a sense of competition.In order to maintain continuous development and growth, any project ecology needs a steady flow of fresh blood.Fantom needs to think about how to attract new DeFi protocols.

1. Fewer validators

As a mature public chain,Solana has1,000 verifier nodes,Terra has 100,and Fantom only has 50. The lack of validators will result in a relatively low number of global, leaderless, and untrusted public chains.At the same time,the degree of decentralization of the public chain is not high enough, which will be less attractive to the DeFi protocol,thus affecting TVL.In conclusion, Fantom needs to add validators.

AC return to Fantom opens new planning

AC’s return is undoubtedly a new redemption for Fantom, who is eager to break out of his own shackles and regroup.With the return of AC,there is also the development plan of Fantom in the next year.On December 26,AC published the Letter to the Fantom Foundation Team, which mentioned the 2023 Fantom plan.Its core focus includes the following contents:

1.Dapp Gas Currency Plan: Reduce the Gas fee destruction rate of FTM tokens from 20% to 5%, and will reduce the destruction of FTMS to reward Fantom creators and developers.The mechanism is similar to that of youtube and twitch creators.

2.Gas fee subsidy: allows users to interact with Dapp without using their wallet to pay for Gas to create a better experience, and users do not need to own or know FTM tokens.

3. Account abstraction: No longer distinguishes between contract accounts and EOA accounts (private accounts), all will be treated as contract accounts.The contract account can initiate transactions and pay for Gas, and the EOA account will be used to control the rights of the contract account so that it can initiate operations.This means that the EOA account will act as an email account security, social authentication, or Face ID for social recovery and a better user experience .

4.Economic abstraction of Gas fees: It is permissible to pay for Gas using tokens other than FTM,depending on the account abstraction.

5. New intermediary software (Fantom virtual machine and new storage mechanism): This part is the focus of Fantom, EVM is still the current major bottleneck,if can break through this problem will be able to reach the physical limit of the hardware.

6. Engineering performance: Optimizations will be made using tools that Bernhard’s team and others have been developing until the hardware limits of throughput are reached.

7. Documentation and training:In the past the Fantom Foundation has focused on teams that are already familiar with Solidity,in the future it will train new builders and non-blockchain native developers and update the documentation.

AC said of Fantom’s latest plans, “Our goal is to extend the base layer and make it easy for developers to build simpler Dapps to grow users while providing them with a sustainable (non-token-based) business model.”

Fantom’s new model becomes the”Youtube” of blockchain platform

The return of AC and Fantom’s rotation is obviously not only for Fantom’s revitalization, but also for a deeper purpose to explore a new development mode for Fantom in the Layer1 public chain competition in the future.

Dapp Gas plan: Fantom to explore a new development model

Fantom’s latest proposal-the Dapp Gas Monetization Program,falls under the Gas sword and is intended to Dev (developers) and according to Fantom,The lack of network effects for Web3 apps is what keeps users from entering the crypto world in large numbers.Take social media. Social media platforms thrive on the success of their content creators, and so does blockchain’s relationship with developers.The goal of Fantom’s new proposal is to attract more developers to join the Fantom ecosystem with an advertising sharing mechanism similar to Youtube,so as to realize the prosperity of the Fantom ecosystem.

In order to achieve long-term effective incentives for developers, Fantom puts forward measures to reduce the FTM destruction rate,reduce the network Gas Fee burning rate from the current 20% to 5%, and allocate 15% of the difference to developers to encourage them to develop more Dapps on the Fantom main network.FTM awards received by DApps can be used at the discretion of the Dapp developer or community, including for salary payment,token repurchase,new feature development,etc.In addition, Fantom also takes a number of complementary measures, including increasing the Dapps allowance for participating in the proposal, compensating public infrastructure (such as RPC vendors), and rewarding high-quality creators,etc.Through these measures,Fantom Foundation hopes to explore a positive cycle model of “developer-Dapp-user-FanTom”, allowing developers to buid from the perspective of users to meet the real needs of users.In this way, we can promote the prosperity and development of the whole Fantom ecology with ourselves as catalyst.

The monetization plan of Dapp Gas has been approved by Fantom Foundation.AC said that the plan will be divided into three stages, the first stage is to reduce the destruction rate of FTM, and the second and third stages will come a few months later. In the future,Fantom will become the Youtube or Twitch of blockchain platform.

FVM Launch: The underlying logic of Fantom’s eco — boom

The current ecology of Fantom is mainly based on AC charisma and drainage of ready-made products,but the future will rely on FVM and ecological synergy. In Fantom’s planning,FVM will become the underlying logic of Fantom’s ecological prosperity in the future.

Different from the general EVM compatibility scheme, this FVM has been improved in many aspects,and on November 22nd Fantom’s official website for publicity, the updated FVM has the following advantages:

• Storage space optimization: the EVM storage scheme for serialization encoding improvement, abandon the ethereum key -value storage mode,the common contract for serial number, contract space only store these numbers, and do not need to place the complete original code, in order to maximize the compression of bytecode data, save block space;
• Intelligent contract operation optimization: Super Instrction mode was introduced to store the executed contracts in the cache, improving the access and execution speed, avoiding the repetitive execution process of each call, so as to improve the response speed of intelligent contract.
• Transaction parallelization: The introduction of parallel mode, change the current sequential execution mode, improve the response speed of the whole network, improve the efficiency of settlement execution, maximize the use of blockchain space and computing power.

In addition,the updated FVM will still maintain the original compatibility of EVM,in order to maximize the use of EVM ecology and reduce the migration workload of developers.From this point of view,the updated FVM is more like a superset of EVM,rather than Layer2 or other chain.On the basis of retaining its own uniqueness, while making good use of the current rich Ethereum ecosystem, so as to establish its own internal Dapp circulation system.

At present, there are still some problems in the improvement scheme of FVM, mainly that EVM or FVM cannot really solve the problem of “infinite computing and storage”. AC believes that it needs to be solved from two perspectives: the first is governance; the monetization of Gas Fee is the first step of decentralized governance scheme; the second is ZK (zero-knowledge proof technology). The technical advantages of ZK can just reduce the workload of the main network in the aspect of proving the effectiveness of the computer. At present, ZK has been included in the Fantom update roadmap, and will be further integrated with FVM in the future.

According to the data of Fantom Foundation, Fantom has initially created its own ecological effect, and the number of Dapps it supports has reached more than 200.It is believed that with the implementation of Dapp Gas monetization plan and the launch of the new version of FVM, more and more Dev will pour into the ecological construction of Fantom in the future.

Summary

The return of AC has brought a new atmosphere and new development ideas for Fantom. Both the adjustment of Gas Fee model and the update of FVM revolve around the continuous construction of FTM.Starting from the underlying development logic, it not only solves the long-standing problems plaguing Fantom, but also points out the future development direction of Fantom.By establishing extensive ecological synergy and social network influence, more developers and users are attracted to join in, and FTM is regarded as a value incentive layer linked together to drive the development of the whole ecological prosperity.

In 2022, the whole blockchain industry was almost full of negative news.At the end of the year, the project represented by Fantom brought us a positive signal, which made us still full of hope for the upcoming 2023.