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Fantom Announces 335M Incentive In FTM, Price Reacts To The Upside

The Fantom Foundation announced an extension of its Incentive Program. The initiative was successful, it received 100 applications to support the ecosystem and disbursed 35 million FTM. Thus, the organization is ready to increase it by ten-fold.

Related Reading | Why Fantom Fell 22% Following Key Personnel Exit

This extension will disburse 335 million in FTM to continue to provide financial aid to developers building “unstoppable applications on the most accessible and user-friendly blockchain”. The organization has partnered with Gitcoin Grants.

Projects will be able to submit their applications and receive funds depending on the Fantom community. The users will decide the allocation, as the foundation clarified, projects with more support from the users will receive “greater FTM matching rewards”.

The foundation aims at providing financial aid to a “wider variety of project types”. Therefore, anyone building on Fantom, regardless of their sector or use case, will be “treated equally and consistently”.

In addition, the foundation attempts to provide its community with more power. As mentioned, they will take center stage when deciding the projects that will be rewarded. The foundation expects to encourage developers to create applications with users as a focus.

Even projects with small total value locked (TVL) or low usage metrics will be allowed to participate and could receive part of the 335 million in FTM. The foundation claims that they will make this initiative “accessible to builders targeting smaller and more niche audiences”.

The Fantom Foundation also announced that they will be participating in the upcoming Gitcoin Grants round. Expected for June 2022, the foundation will match user donations with 3 million in FTM during the first round. Subsequent rounds will be matched with 1.5 million in FTM.

The foundation added the following:

As of today and effective immediately, we’re sunsetting the previously announced incentive programs, both for DeFi and Games. We encourage current and pending applicants to apply for Gitcoin grants in the forthcoming rounds.

Fantom After Andre Cronje’s Retirement From Crypto

As NewsBTC reported, Fantom saw a negative impact when Andre Cronje announced its departure from the project. The price of its native token trended to the downside as pessimism grew amongst some holders.

However, FTM’s price has recovered, and the project seems able to carry on without Cronje. At the time of writing, FTM trades at $1.56 with a 5% profit in the last hour and a 19% profit in the past week.

FTM’s price with small gains on the 4-hour chart. Source: FTMUSDT Tradingview

As the foundation announces more initiatives aimed at supporting the Fantom ecosystem, the projects seem poised to continue on their current trajectory. Data from Material Indicators shows FTM’s price broke above a large wall of asks orders below its current levels.

Source: Material Indicators

Related Reading | Yearn Finance Creator To Launch New AMM, What It’s All About?

Still, there is some resistance at $1.6 with little support or bid orders below FTM’s current price. In case of further downside action, $1.50 will be critical support.

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A Race For The Truth: Fantom Vs. Rekt, What Went Down

A recently taken down investigation by Rekt News about the Fantom Foundation dug into several moves that could point to a lack of transparency from the DeFi platform. The article had called it “an elaborate scheme,” but apparently failed to approach the subject with enough accuracy.

1-2 hours after publishing the piece, Rekt deleted it and tweeted an apology. An archive from the original investigation can be found here.

This response from Rekt was not seen as clear enough by their readers. Why didn’t they publicly clarify their mistake? Several users have pointed out that it is fundamental for crypto journalism to carefully fact-check allegations because they could have an impact on the market.

However, the readers who debunked the investigation also added important data and signaled that there might still be gaps of information about Fantom that need to be looked into.

A Quick Sum-Up

Following the news of Andre Cronje and Anton Nell leaving the DeFi and crypto space, Rekt took a look into the first wallet of farm YFI (wallet 0x431), which they had previously started to investigate.

“We found that 0x431 had an unmatched level of power over the entire network, all in the hands of one EOA wallet.”

Seemingly, the 0x431 wallet had made huge transfers in FTM over the last 5 months ($750M in FTM) “using another address as a buffer before sending to Binance.” This and many other details found by Rekt suggested a “centralised money-making scheme” and “gross mismanagement of their foundation funds.”

Rekt interviewed Fantom, but the answers –or lack of them– did not clear up their many assumptions and raised more concerns, which led the investigation to believe that “basic operational security measures are simply not being met”

“Either the foundation is lying, or this is a gross mismanagement issue from the Fantom Foundation.”

The Inaccuracies

A Twitter user shed some light and debunked one by one most of the claims published in the article by adding overseen valuable data. They also stated that the kind of investigations conducted by Rekt are crucial for the crypto and DeFi environment, but this time they “missed to spot the shady practices.”

The user explained that “The wallet in question [0x431] sent FTM ERC20 tokens to Binance ETH and then withdrew it to the same wallet address on Fantom. Why? To fuel the bridge with Fantom native tokens.”

This was verified by the CEO of Multichain, Zhaojun:

“I can confirm fantom guys use 0x431e81 account to reblance the Multichain bridge’s fantom liquidity.

1. Deposit FTM-erc20 to Binance,

2. Withdraw native FTM and deposit to Bridge. https://ftmscan.com/tx/0xa16cc05ccb8a2c5ced10ae0ba80fd1dff736fff19b18d2c277d457725dce4202…

3. Repeat steps.”

The other wallet in question, 0x579, also seems to be a bridge, although the Fantom Foundation had claimed otherwise.

The user added that “it appears not ALL FTM which entered Binance on Ethereum reappeared on Fantom. Yes, the majority did, but further investigation in exact numbers would be useful.”

Rekt had noted that the wallets in question made huge moves during a period of increased FTM FOMO, but the quoted user finds that this makes sense since “in this time A LOT of people wanted to enter Fantom Network via the bridge. So the team put more effort into fueling it with native FTM.”

However, some questions done by Rekt remain open, like why are the foundation’s funds not being stored on a multisig?

The Foundation had also claimed that the funds from wallet 0x57900 were in part supposed to be for the incentives program announced in August along with other FTM that the foundation holds. The cited user also considers it important to know “how & to whom (and why) incentives are distributed.”

NewsBTC reached out to the Rekt team with several questions about the investigation process behind the article, but they did not reach back for comments.

Some have claimed they are liable for losses.

The Fantom Foundation released a statement alleging that Rekt had made “many false claims about the Foundation” and seemingly attempted to calm the investors’ concerns over Andre Cronje’s departure. It does not seem like they will be taking legal measures against Rekt.

Fantom Price

Fantom (FTM) has responded with a downward movement to the news of Andre Cronje and Anton Nell leaving the DeFi and crypto space. FTM also seems to be following the general crypto market trend and it is down 5.12% in the last 24 hours.

FTM trading at $1,20 in the daily chart | Source: FTMUSD on TradingView.com

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Why Fantom Fell 22% Following Key Personnel Exit

Fantom (FTM) price decreased 22% by reaching $1.32 per coin after key personnel associated with its project announced that they were leaving.

Fantom is in deep trouble following the departure of two high-profile employees, Anton Nell, a senior solutions architect, and Andre Cronje, a prolific developer, without providing any clues about why they left.

Related Reading | Crypto Markets Slightly Recover After Weekend Decline

The Fantom cryptocurrency has seen a sharp decline in value over the past week, dropping 22% to hit lows near $1.32 on Monday, according to Coinmarketcap data. This brings their total asset value down about 60% from its peak. 

FTM price at $1.32 after touching $1.38 today | Source: FTM/USD chart on Tradingview.com

The token’s peak came during January 16th, when it reached $3.3 per coin. Since then, there have been many decreases which eventually led up until now, where they’re currently sitting at just $1.32 each – a reduction of approximately 60%.

With the news, the price of dozens of tokens plunged. 

The price fluctuation of cryptocurrencies has been unpredictable lately, with some Gain Others Lose. But one thing that remains constant is the importance each individual holds regarding their cryptocurrency’s value- whether through trading or holding. 

Experts Reviews On The News

Raj A Kapoor, the founder of India Blockchain Alliance, said, “the price fluctuation is a response to the news reiterates just how critical an individual can be to a crypto’s value.” 

It was assumed that an announcement regarding this would be made soon, as Cronje deleted his Twitter account and Linkedin reflected a change in association with Fantom Foundation.

Edul Patel, CEO and Co-founder of Mudrex, believes that Cronje’s exit might influence DeFi space. “We’ll see sell-off initially, but it should be temporary,” he said with confidence.

Patel added developers continue building on the space, and one person’s exit will not cause turmoil because of their sudden change.

The analyst said Investors might press the panic button amidst recent volatility.

“The markets don’t like uncertainty,” said Pratik Gauri, founder, and CEO of 5ire. “Also, investors realized it may be overstretched in valuation,” he added.

Gauri said many people don’t know the reasons behind her sudden exit, but it will affect the price.

Fantom (FTM) Ecosystem

The Fantom ecosystem’s tokens followed suit and dropped down drastically. For example, SpookySwap (BOO), LiquidDriver(LQDR ), Geist Finance, Tomb; these four prominent chains saw their prices fall up to 20%.

The volume of Fantom tokens has skyrocketed, more than doubling over the last 24 hours.

Related Reading | Yearn Finance (YFI) Down 13% Following Andre Conje’s Exit

Patel from Mudrex said;

Tokens would likely bounce back because DeFi is meant to be a trustless system of finance. In which no one single person has the power to influence the system.

“A lot of other projects were dependent on Yearn and Fanton. It’s a DeFi network for all of your favorite blockchains,” said Gauri, “and it has over 80 DApps on there.”

The data suggests that 80% of Fantom’s total supply is available in the market, with its maximum cap at 3,175,000,000 tokens. Of this, 2,545,006,273 are currently circulating.

Raj A Kapoor advised hunting for better opportunities available by saying; 

One big problem with Fantom is gas pricing. The unpredictable volatility may pass, but in a crypto arena that’s getting crowded, Fantom may not be worth that wait.

                Featured image from Pixabay, chart from Tradingview.com

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Yearn Finance (YFI) Down 13% Following Andre Conje’s Exit

Yearn Finance (YFI) has plunged rapidly following the surprise exit of its key players. The cryptocurrency which had been following the market trend had broken off the step with the rest of the space as the news sent ripples through the community. The plunge which occurred on Sunday came as a direct result of uncertainty spread across the community after Anton Nell announced that he, alongside Andre Conje, would be exiting the space.

Nell had taken to Twitter to post the shocking exit. According to him, he and Conje had been planning their exit for a while and would officially stop contributing to the crypto and decentralized finance (DeFi) space.

Related Reading | Bitcoin Activity Soars Post SWIFT Ban On Russia, BTC At Do Or Die Spot?

Conje had played an important role throughout the existence of the Fantom blockchain. The developer had pioneered various important projects like Yearn Finance (YFI), Keep3r Network, Multichain, Chainlist, among others, all of which have been highly successful and very popular with crypto investors. With the move, Nell announced that they would eventually terminate around 25 apps and services that they currently offer on Fantom.

Nell provided further explanation for the move, explaining that “Unlike previous “building in defi sucks” rage quits, this is not a knee-jerk reaction to the hate received from releasing a project, but a decision that has been coming for a while now.”

Yearn Finance Takes The Hit

The impact of this decision was quickly felt across the space. Most notably was its impact on the prices of the protocols that these devs worked on. Yearn Finance which is arguably the most successful project of the lot quickly tumbled as news of the exit circulated.

In the early hours of Sunday, YFI dropped 13% from its spot above $20,000 to the low $17K. The drop in price was quick and sharp, responding to the news. A small recovery had followed that saw YFI crawl back up into the $18K price level but there has not been much uptick in the way of momentum, suggesting that the current downtrend might continue as the day unfolds.

Yearn Finance will continue to operate as always, just without the contributions of Conje or Nell going forward.

YFI plunges 13% following news of Conje’s exit | Source: YFIUSD on TradingView.com
Fantom Foundation Responds

Andre Conje’s exit from the crypto and decentralized finance space no doubt has some implications for a network like Fantom. Thus, the response from the Fantom Foundation was swift.

Related Reading | Bitcoin Falls Back To $38,000 As Russia Steps Up Bombardment Of Ukraine

The foundation acknowledged the role that Conje had played in the space and the influence he had but explained that it does not impact the development in any way. Fantom Foundation noted that Conje was not a core dev, so development will continue in his absence.

The team effort is what allowed Fantom to become one of the most utilized and loved decentralized networks in world.

Hundreds of developers build on Fantom daily and 100k+ unique address use Fantom every day.

Contrary to some popular belief, Andre wasn't a core dev at Fantom.

— Fantom Foundation (@FantomFDN) March 6, 2022

The network’s native token FTM had also taken a hit in its price following the news. FTM had seen its value crash from above $1.5 coming into the last lap of the weekend to $1.4 in a matter of hours. However, the token has held up nicely through the aftermath and continues to trend upwards.

Featured image from FX Empire, chart from TradingView.com

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Data Shows Layer-1 Price Growth Reflects Unique Address Proliferation

Is that time of the year again, Bitcoin seems stuck in a never ending range while Layer-1 coins and other cryptocurrencies rally. The crypto market ended 2021 with important profits, but not with the bang everyone seemed to have been expecting.

Related Reading | TA: Why Ethereum Bulls Aim Fresh Rally Above $4K

Arcane Research recorded important growth in Layer-1 coins, such as Fantom (FTM), and Avalanche (AVAX) as a result of a 2021 full of adoption. These cryptocurrencies experienced rallies over 15x against Ethereum (ETH) and took a portion of its market share.

Arcane Research claims the growing popularity in decentralized finances (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and the transaction fee increase on the Ethereum network. The latter phenomenon started in 2020 with the “Summer of DeFi”, the period that saw the biggest boom in DeFi users leading to an increase in network usage.

The proliferation of NFTs contributed with that issue and let layer-1 coins such as Binance Smart Chain (BSC), Solana (SOL), and others to onboard those users that were priced out of Ethereum. The same seems to be happening with Fantom and Avalanche. Arcane Research claimed the following:

As illustrated on the charts, the greater the number of users of a particular protocol, the more value it tends to attain. In other words, the hypothesis that a multi-year bear is lurking because altcoins have gone up too much requires some nuance.

Source: Arcane Research

The explosive growth in these layer-1 coins could followed a similar path as those cryptocurrencies that benefited for a short term only to see their use base decimated, or users could form communities and become permanent contributors with their expansion. In that sense, the implementation of second layer scalability solutions for Ethereum could become a threat for those projects.

A Multi-Chain Industry Supported By Layer-1 Cryptos

A separate report by Delphi Digital records a major growth in other layer-1 projects during 2021. Terra (LUNA) was one of the most important on those terms alongside Polygon (MATIC), a scalability platform for the Ethereum ecosystem.

In terms of total value lock (TVL), Terra saw a 356x increase while Polygon experienced a 17,100x increase in its TVL. As seen below, Fantom and Avalanche entered the top 10 blockchains by TVL but with a smaller increase that the aforementioned cryptocurrencies.

Source: Delphi Digital via Twitter

Despite its high transaction fees, and congestion issues Ethereum remained the largest network in terms of TVL during 2021 and preserved its dominance, for the time being. When analyzing the biggest protocols by TVL, it is interesting to find Lido Finance and Multichain, as Delphi Digital claimed, two platforms with interoperable and cross-chain capabilities.

This could hint at a future where Ethereum and layer-1 coins find themselves in an equal field as users turn to the latter in search of a more cost-efficient ecosystem, and cross-chain features.

Related Reading | TA: Ethereum Plunges After Rejection: Technicals Remain Bullish

As of press time, ETH trades at $3,811 with a 1% loss in the past day.

ETH moving sideways in the 4-hour chart. Source: ETHUSD Tradingview

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Optimism Will Roll Out Single-Click Launch For Ethereum Projects

Many layer 2 solutions are competing on being the most active in developments. Amid these scaling solutions in Optimism, and given its latest announcement, it will soon enable developers to launch DApps with just a single click of a button.

Optimism provides support for all the apps on the Ethereum ecosystem. It ensures that transaction fees are lower by keeping its data on the blockchain but running computation off-chain.

The team’s latest blog reveals that an upcoming upgrade will facilitate the launch of DApps on its layer. This means that every tool running on Ethereum will also run on Optimism.

Latest Upgrade To Provide Support For Ethereum Protocols

The disclosure by the Optimism team assures the developer’s community that the upgrade will help them to simplify the process of launching their decentralized apps. Also, this simplicity stems across features such as gas and traces. Developers targeting Geth now have the opportunity to launch without changing their codes.

Related Reading | New To Bitcoin? Learn To Trade Crypto With The NewsBTC Trading Course

Optimism disclosed that it had overhauled the codes. As a result, it can now go beyond being compatible Ethereum Virtual Machine only to become an EVM equivalence by making its protocol efficient and lightweight.

One of the steps the team took to reduce the protocol’s load was to delete its custom compiler. It also deleted over 25,000 lines of codes as it upgraded.

According to the post, the team asserts that developing the “EVM-compliant rollup” is not very easy given that it aims to support the whole Ethereum stack. Moreover, to also implement the security features which EVM requires will also cost a lot of money. However, it is mandatory because every line of codes added to the system comes with possible vulnerabilities.

Optimism Pursuing Compatibility

As for now, the layer 2 scaling solution is now fully equivalent with EVM using Geth. Though it is working to become compatible with alternative node implementations such as Erigon and OpenEthereum using below one thousand lines of codes. The team disclosed that they hadn’t changed the security model of the protocol even with this release.

The reason behind the growth of Optimism is the move from Ethereum mainnet to other chains & layer 2 solutions compatible with EVM

Ethereum has fallen by 7% in 24 hours | Source: ETHUSD on TradingView.com

The migration of capital from Ethereum to these other solutions was to reduce the high fees characterizing transactions carried out on its base layer.

Related Reading | While Broader Crypto Market Holds Its Collective Breath, Whales Are Loading Up On Bitcoin

The information from Dune Analytics even reveals that another rollup network Arbitrum has a TVL of $2.62 billion, which is the largest ETH Bridge. This rival protocol went live three weeks ago, and it is already making waves.

But it is not the only protocol as Polygon ERC-20 Bridge emerged after Arbitrum and is now boasting $2.35 billion in TVL. After Polygon came, Avalanche Bridge and Fantom Anyswap Bridge and each now record $1.86 billion and $476 million, respectively.

Featured image from Forbes, chart from TradingView.com

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Solana Continues Bullish Trend, Becomes The 10th Largest Cryptocurrency

Solana, with its fast-growing ecosystem, has found a position at the forefront within the crypto space. By hitting $314 million in its private token sales, Solana crept the headlines in early June. Polychain and Andreessen Horowitz pioneered the Solana token sales.

This funding impacted greatly in developing the fast-growing ecosystem of Solana. This pushes it as one of the top competitors to Ethereum, the blockchain with the widest usage.

Before now, the Ethereum blockchain has high demand from crypto users and investors. Unfortunately, this results in network congestion and exorbitant transaction fees.

The congestion propelled the great opportunities for sidechains and Layer 2 solutions. Also, Layer 1 networks can take from the loopholes and create scalable decentralized apps beyond Ethereum. Solana falls under such Layer 1 networks.

Related Reading | Coinbase States Infrastructure Bill Could Impact 60 Million American Crypto Owners

Founded in 2017, the project team realized over $25 million through its private and public ICO token sales. March 2020 brought the release of the main net beta.

The project is reputable for its 400ms block time and 50,000 throughput for transactions per second. This performance is higher than Bitcoin and Ethereum’s current version by several thousands of times. Though both of these formers platforms rely on Proof-of-Work consensus.

Solana has a theoretical capacity of 700,000 transactions per second through its focus on scale for more adoption, as contained in its whitepaper.

The technological design of Solana accounts for its high performance in scalability. The blockchain can process transactions horizontally in parallel using its sea-level runtime. Thus, the blockchain has continuous scalability with validator GPU improvements, thereby maintaining low fees.

The CEO of Solana Labs, Anatoly Yakovenko, reveals that the network’s scalability level is proportionally linked to hardware computation. This accounts for its execution of tens of thousands of transactions of smart contracts in parallel.

Also, the network uses several GPU cores to validators. The major network down part is that running a specialized hardware validator can cost thousands of dollars.

Solana Performance Trend

Solana satisfies its aim of having a distributed system for transaction scalability in proportion to its bandwidth.

The network achieves its aim through the use of some features like the consensus algorithm Tower BFT. Other outstanding enabling features are the Proof-of-History and Proof-of-History-Optimized versions of BFT.

The network currently boasts over 900 validators. Though Ethereum remains the most Defi smart contract blockchain, Solana has made a name than other Layer 1 chains. It’s more decentralized than Binance Smart Chain, Polkadot, Fantom, and Cosmos.

Solana has maintained a bullish momentum and it seems to be on an upward direction | Source: SOLUSD on TradingView.com

Several new protocols are building on the Solana blockchain to leverage its fast and low transaction fees. This has propelled more rise of more dApps in the Defi ecosystem.

The ecosystem now has more decentralized exchanges, yield aggregators, automated market makers, and stablecoin swap platforms.

Related Reading | SushiSwap Narrowly Escaped A $350 Million DeFi Hack, Here’s How

Others include NFT marketplaces: wallets, gaming platforms, and derivatives. The Chain also has projects based on infrastructures such as block explorers, oracles, launchpads, and data analytics tools.

When it comes to its operability, unlike Ethereum, SOL has no support for Solidity programming language. So, it’s not EVM compatible, and this puts a gap in its competition with Ethereum.

However, the Solana network utilizes Rust as its programming language. Fortunately, Rust is becoming one of the preferred languages in the most developing communities in the Defi ecosystem.

Furthermore, Neon Labs plans on providing SOL with EVM compatibility by porting Solidity smart contracts on the network.

Featured image from Pixabay, chart from TradingView.com