Original author: The Dark Side of the Moon
Original source: PANews
The public chain Fantom has "regained strength" again after being dormant for a long time.
On December 1, the Fantom Foundation released a DApp Gas Fee monetization proposal to reduce the FTM burning rate. If the proposal is passed, the FTM burning rate will be reduced from the current 20% to 5%. Combined with the progress of Fantom Virtual Machine (FVM) previously introduced on the official blog on November 22, Fantom hopes to find a new path in the competition of Layer 1 public chains.
Moreover, AC (Andre Cronje), who once made Fantom popular, also took the opportunity to return to the cryptocurrency world. On March 6 this year, AC announced that it would withdraw from the circle, and the token prices of AC series projects such as Fantom and Yearn plummeted. At that time, Fantom CEO Michael Kong also specifically tweeted to clarify, saying, "AC is just one of the developers of the Fantom ecosystem, and Fantom will not Therefore, operations have ceased." As of November 9, AC's personal LinkedIn page showed that he had served as the Architect of Fantom Foundation.
On December 26, Andre Cronje published the "Letter to the Fantom Foundation Team", which mentioned the core focus of Fantom's plan in 2023. According to reports, Fantom's focus next year will need to be on vertical developers, and the overall goal will be to create a sustainable development environment for dapp developers to distinguish it from other public chains.
Core focus will include Gas Monetization, Gas Subsidy, Account Abstraction, Economic Abstraction of Gas Fees, New Middleware (Fantom Virtual Machine, New Storage Mechanism), Hardware Limitations to Optimize Throughput (PebbleDB, Flat Storage, etc.), Targeting new Updated documentation and training for builders and non-blockchain developers, timely financial disclosures, funding and funding opportunities for dapp teams, and more.
In addition, Andre also mentioned in the letter that he has been officially nominated and accepted the position of board member of Fantom Foundation and Fantom Operations.
Can AC's return and Fantom's actions help Fantom once again win a place in the public chain competition?
Network Effect: Reduce the FTM destruction rate to save the Fantom ecosystem
Fantom changed the FTM destruction model this time, which belongs to the Gas sword dance and is intended for Dev (developer).
Since this year, Fantom has made some progress in supporting developers by increasing its budget for market expansion, launching FVM launches, sponsoring events (such as Gitcoin Grants), and hosting events (London/Lisbon/New York).
But the longer-term incentive mechanism has not really been established.
The purpose of this proposal is to 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 mainnet.
The conditions for this dApp to apply for rewards are as follows:
- Complete at least 1,000,000 transactions;
- Deployed on the Fantom Opera network for 3 months or more.
The FTM rewards received by the dApp can be used at the discretion of the dApp developer or the community, including for salary payment, token repurchase, research and development of new features, etc.
During the gap between slowing down the destruction rate and dApps receiving applications, excess FTM will be generated. The proposal also envisages the use of slowing inflation, which mainly includes the following aspects:
- Increase the stipend for dApps participating in this proposal;
- Compensating public welfare infrastructure (such as RPC providers);
- Increase matching grants donated to Gitcoin Grants
- Donate to the mainnet treasury;
- Send to Burning FTM address;
- To reward high-quality creators.
According to Fantom, the reason that prevents users from entering the encryption world on a large scale is the lack of "network effects" in Web 3 applications.
Take social media as an example, "Social media platforms thrive because of the success of their content creators, and so does the relationship between blockchain and developers."
This clearly shows that the Fantom Foundation hopes to improve its competitiveness through the joint effect of "developers-Dapp-users-Fantom". The essence of this is to allow developers to build from the user's perspective to meet real user needs.
The idea of this Gas Fee adjustment comes from the "advertising monetization" developers in the Web 2 world to attract traffic through high-quality applications, and then sell the traffic to advertisers to obtain profits. In Web 3, developers of high-quality After a quality application attracts traffic, it does not mean that it can be directly monetized. Generally speaking, there are three monetization methods:
- Charging handling fees, such as Metamask’s built-in Swap function, the handling fee is as high as 0.875%;
- Issuing tokens, such as Uniswap issuing Uni, stabilizes prices by giving them governance functions;
- Fantom's FTM monetization proposal will reward dApp developers on the mainnet.
In addition, Fantom's improvement of the Gas Fee destruction model is not a temporary move. The adjustment of the FTM inflation model has already begun.
Proposal to establish an ecological support treasury
As early as July 28, Fantom put forward a proposal to distribute 10% of the 30% Gas Fee destruction amount to the "Ecosystem Support Vault" to encourage developer retention.
This proposal has passed with a thrilling approval rate of 57.6% on October 3. This is exactly the same as the so-called dApp Gas monetization idea. In essence, they hope to rescue FTM from simple burning and create more Use scenarios and attract more users.
FTM Gas Fee changes the destruction model
Taking the details of this proposal as an example, the destruction rate will drop from 20% to 5%, but the 15% difference will not be directly released to the secondary market. Flooding will only increase inflation, but it is hoped that through targeted distribution To the developer community, they can obtain FTM at a lower price and lower the Gas Fee of the entire Fantom network, thus creating a flywheel effect and encouraging more users to use Fantom.
But even if this proposal is successfully passed, it is still unclear whether Fantom can successfully operate this flywheel, because Fantom currently does not have sufficient development power.
According to data from Gokustats, measured by developer activity. The current ranking of the more mainstream public chain developer activity is as follows:
Public chain development status
From the data in the above table, we can see that Fantom has only 31 weekly active developers, which is about 1.3% of Ethereum’s 2,348 people. In terms of (warehouse) Reops and weekly submission volume, it is also the same as the current mainstream public chains, such as Ethereum, There is a big gap between BNB CHain, Polkadot and Solana.
However, from a developer's perspective, the public chain operator's willingness to give up profits is itself a profitable thing, and it is difficult to say how much loyalty the current Web 3 users have.
The launch of FVM: the underlying logic of Fantom ecological prosperity
Fantom's current ecosystem mainly relies on AC's personal charm and the introduction of ready-made products, but in the future it will rely on FVM and ecological synergy.
Needless to say, AC has shown his deep understanding of DeFi whether it is in a single AMM DEX Solidly or the classic aggregated income Yearn Finance, but this time can he turn this past advantage into Fantom’s existing It will take time to observe the ecology and create a second independent DeFi world outside of Ethereum.
Drainage refers to introducing mature applications into the Fantom ecosystem to avoid the cold start problem of building from scratch.
In terms of traffic drainage, typical examples include inviting Aave and Curve to settle in. On December 12, Gitcoin officially deployed Grants Protocol on Fantom, and launched voting on that day to select funding projects. The Fantom Foundation stated that it had received hundreds of letters of intent to apply.
Draining traffic is just a defensive move at the moment. Fantom's future still requires the ability to grasp future directions such as FVM and ZK.
Different from general EVM compatibility solutions, this FVM improvement has the following main advantages:
- Storage space optimization. Improve the serialization coding of the EVM storage solution, abandon the key-value pair storage model of Ethereum, and serialize commonly used contracts. The contract space only stores these numbers without placing the complete original code to maximize the compression of bytecode data. , save block space;
- Smart contract operation optimization. Introduce the Super Instrction mode to store already executed contracts in the cache, improve access and execution speed, avoid repeated execution processes for each call, and improve the response speed of smart contracts.
- Transaction parallelization. Introduce parallel mode, change the current sequential execution mode, improve the response speed of the entire network, improve the efficiency of settlement execution, and maximize the use of blockchain space and computing power.
Compatible with solidity. After the update, FVM will still maintain native compatibility with EVM to maximize the use of the EVM ecosystem and reduce the migration workload of developers.
From this perspective, FVM is more like a superset of EVM rather than Layer 2 or side chain. On the basis of retaining its own uniqueness, FVM makes good use of the current rich Ethereum ecosystem to establish its own Dapp. circulatory system.
In addition, the FVM improvement of the current solution still has its bottleneck, mainly because EVM or FVM cannot truly solve the problem of "infinite computing and storage". Current computing and storage solutions are optimized within certain limits.
AC believes that it needs to be solved from two perspectives, the first is governance, and the second is ZK.
Gas Fee monetization is the first step in a decentralized governance plan. What really needs to be done is the construction of a comprehensive decentralized mechanism. "Our construction is not to maintain our own existence, our construction is to eliminate us."
Our goal, and every choice we make, is not about "what's in it for us (as a company)" but "how can we eliminate dependence on us." The goal is not about "how do we make money?" more money so we can fund more projects,” but “how do we create an environment where projects can sustain themselves and get funding from the community.”
In terms of unlimited storage and computing, AC's view is that unlimited storage can only be achieved by drawing on ideas similar to p2p file sharing or torrent seed files.
ZK technology can just reduce the workload of the mainnet in proving the effectiveness of operations. Currently, ZK has been included in the Fantom update roadmap and will be further integrated with FVM in the future.
Only by creating a self-organized community culture can developers and users achieve a harmonious situation of sustainable prosperity within the same ecosystem.
At present, Fantom has initially created its own ecological effect. According to Fantom Foundation data, the number of Dapps it currently supports has reached more than 200+.
Fantom ecosystem
Conclusion
The return of AC and the adjustment of Gas Fee model are all centered on the continuous construction of FTM. Starting from the logic of underlying development, FVM is undergoing a second transformation of EVM.
At present, it seems that AC's idea of building Fantom is correct. It should establish extensive ecological synergy and social network influence, thereby attracting more developers and users, and then use FTM as the value incentive layer that connects everything.
