fantom beginner's guide part 1

Ethereum is easily the biggest blockchain, aside from Bitcoin. But for many years, Ethereum users complained about the high cost of transactions and low speed.

So, several platforms emerged to address this problem, and one of them was Fantom. Fantom, like most layer-1 platforms, seeks to offer an alternative to the high-cost Ethereum blockchain.

What is the Fantom Blockchain?

Fantom is a DAG-based (Directed Acyclic Graph) smart contract platform that is powered by its native token, FTM. The project launched its mainnet in December 2019 after a $40 million fund. Fantom is pretty fast and affordable and has the infrastructure to support its own DeFi ecosystem.

Fantom is a decentralized, highly scalable, permissionless, and open-source platform for building decentralized applications. Fantom’s DAG is a data modeling system whose networks feature vertices and edges, unlike blockchains, which are made up of blocks. So, transactions are represented by vertices and are placed on top of one another. The Layer-1 platform achieves this via a “leaderless” PoS consensus mechanism known as Lachesis.

Also, Fantom has both security and transactional speed, which is an asynchronous Byzantine fault-tolerant (aBFT) consensus mechanism. So, it can operate without any fault even if there’s a fraudulent third transaction. It can also process network data at different times. It also boasts near-instant finality, which means it finalizes and confirms transactions in seconds.

Fantom is also compatible with the Ethereum virtual machine (EVM), so transferring assets from dApps from Ethereum to Fantom is simple. Polygon, Avalanche, and the BNB Chain are also EVM compatible. Watch the video below to understand more about Fantom

FTM Token Use Cases

The FTM token plays a huge role on Fantom. Here are some of its use cases:

  • Payments
  • Staking: Users can stake FTM to secure the network and receive rewards in FTM. They do not need any special devices for this.
  • Network fees: Users can use FTM to pay for different network fees, including deploying Fantom smart contracts.
  • Governance: FTM is needed for on-chain governance. Fantom’s decisions are made by the on-chain governance structures since it is decentralized. So, FTM plays a role in voting.
  • Security.

Here is a chart that summarizes the use cases of the FTM token:

What is the Fantom Virtual Machine?

Last year, Fantome announced an upgrade known as the Fantom Virtual Machine (FVM), which would make it more efficient and faster. EVM is known to be slow and is not optimized for storage. However, FVM is fast, maintainable, and solidity-compatible. So, FVM comes with smarter smart contract execution, greater bandwidth, and more efficient databases storage.

How to be a Validator in Fantom?

According to Fantom’s docs, the minimum stake required to run a Fantom validator node is 500,000 FTM. The steps include:

1) Launch a cloud instance. Here, you run a node on a cloud provider’s server or on your own hardware.

2) Set up a non-root user. This part requires you to adjust a few technical settings.

3) Install the needed tools.

4) Register a validator by creating a validator wallet.

5) Run the validator node.

The validator reward includes the regular APY on the staked amount and the delegator reward of 15%. However, the APY differs based on the % of the total FTM supply staked.

That’s it for this part of our beginner’s guide. Continue reading the second part of this article.

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