Forward the Original Title‘公链的新叙事之Fantom：Sonic出场重启性能竞赛’

The blockchain is the foundation for the growth of blockchain technology. In the process of advancing blockchain technology, the innovation and evolution of public chain technology have played an indelible role. From Bitcoin to Ethereum, they have brought a new landscape of smart contracts to the crypto world; and from Ethereum to new public chains like Solana, they have opened up the possibility of Web3 moving towards mass adoption. In each bull market cycle, new leaders in public chains emerge, becoming a benchmark for the bull market cycle and a cradle for technological innovation. To gain a deeper understanding of the entire crypto world, PANews hereby launches a series of articles on “New Narratives of Public Chains,” exploring the new narratives and potential of various public chains from the latest developments, technological changes, market potential, etc.

In the past month, the market performance of Fantom’s governance token FTM has been particularly prominent among many public chains. From $0.42 on February 24th to a peak of $1.23 on March 21st, an increase of nearly 3 times. Against the backdrop of the meme frenzy, such market performance is indeed impressive.

“Today, my confidence in Fantom is stronger than it was in 2019. The team is 100 times stronger than before. The financial situation is 250 times stronger than before. Our technical stack has increased by 160 times and is more optimized. If you think Fantom will go to zero or disappear into the ocean of irrelevant blockchain projects, I am willing to accept this reverse bet.” Andre Cronje, known as the “DeFi father,” once again expressed his confidence in Fantom on Twitter. Despite several retreats, AC’s confidence in Fantom remains unwavering. AC’s confidence may stem from Fantom’s new technology, Sonic, which was just released on March 25th. According to Fantom’s official introduction, “The Fantom team has been working hard on our new technology, Sonic, for the past two years. This is the most scalable and secure blockchain technology to date. Compared to Opera’s 200 TPS, Sonic can process 2,000 TPS at sub-second speeds, which is a huge improvement.” Sonic technology may also become one of Fantom’s main narratives in the coming years.

With AC’s hype, Fantom is emerging from the quagmire of the multichain event. In this bull market cycle, PANews will analyze Fantom’s recent developments, upcoming Sonic upgrades, building a meme coin ecosystem, and AC’s return, which may become the main elements of Fantom’s comeback in this bull market cycle.

Sonic Upgrade Takes Center Stage

The Sonic upgrade undoubtedly takes the spotlight as Fantom’s primary narrative. On March 25th, Fantom founder Michael Kong released the first part of Sonic on the blog. This post introduced the performance upgrade content related to Fantom Sonic and a series of governance proposals. The introduction of Fantom Sonic shows that it can achieve over 10 times TPS improvement. As seen from past conventions, the original story of the rise of public chains is often related to performance, as evidenced by previous star public chains like Solana and Avalanche.

For Fantom, the technical aspect is evidently the main focus of the narrative at present. Whether it’s the Fantom Foundation or AC, both have been vigorously promoting the performance advantages of Sonic recently. In summary, the main performance improvement of Sonic lies in the enhancement of efficiency. By combining Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAG) and Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT), Fantom has achieved a consensus mechanism without centralized leaders. Compared with Fantom’s existing Opera chain, Sonic’s performance has seen significant improvement.

Andre Cronje made a notable comparison between EVM and FVM on Twitter:

The basic Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) has a limit of about 200 TPS, with an additional optimistic parallelism (predictable best-case scenario), it can increase by up to 40 TPS, with a total maximum of 240 TPS.

The basic Fantom Virtual Machine (FVM) has a limit of about 30,000 TPS, with an additional brute-force parallelism (bad), it can increase by up to 4,500 TPS, with a total maximum of 34,500 TPS.

So, how should we understand the changes brought by this technology? We can use a simple analogy to explain:

Imagine you’re running a fast-food restaurant (the Ethereum main chain), and customers (transactions) are lining up waiting to place orders and pick up meals. To improve service efficiency, you come up with two solutions:

Parallel EVM: It’s like adding multiple order windows and kitchens in the fast-food restaurant, allowing multiple employees to serve customers simultaneously. Each order window and kitchen can work independently, but they are still in the same fast-food restaurant, following the same rules and procedures. By parallel processing customers’ orders, the fast-food restaurant’s service speed and customer satisfaction are improved.

Sonic: Sonic works similarly to introducing a highly optimized central kitchen that can produce a large number of standardized foods in a short time and then distribute them quickly to various branches (Layer 1 and Layer 2). This central kitchen (Sonic) adopts advanced equipment and processes, capable of producing food at extremely high speed and efficiency, far exceeding the production capacity of a single fast-food restaurant or branch.

If the technology can be implemented as planned, it may bring more new projects and users to the Fantom ecosystem. To this end, the Fantom Foundation has also proposed expanding and accelerating the Sonic Labs funding program (Sonic Labs is a startup accelerator program launched by Fantom in February this year, aimed at promoting innovation in its new Sonic technology stack. The program will select up to five projects, each of which will receive 1 million FTM (approximately $294,000) in funding, technical support, joint marketing, and mentorship), while also stating that a series of user reward activities will be launched, and the new chain is expected to be launched in late summer or early autumn this year.

Is the official promotion of Meme coins able to replicate Solana’s legendary success?

The Meme coin ecosystem has become a battleground for public chains in this bull market cycle, with a trend of “the one who gets the Meme wins.” Recently, the Fantom Foundation retweeted an introduction to the $sGOAT Meme. It has become the MEME coin with the most holders on Fantom (over 1,000 holders) within a day of its launch. Combined with some of Fantom’s official content about upgrades, including performance improvements and gas fee reductions, Fantom has built a fertile ground suitable for the growth of the Meme ecosystem. Comparisons with Solana were made during the introduction. Plus, with the official proactive forwarding of some Meme information, Fantom’s interest in Memes is much greater than before.

The Fantom Foundation retweeted a tweet about the Meme coin $sGOAT. However, the explosion of Meme coins often represents the result of ecosystem prosperity. Currently, there are 254 projects in the Fantom ecosystem, with a surge in new addresses in February 2024, reaching a peak of 570,000 new addresses in a single day. However, with the recent frequent official actions, the daily increase in addresses is only in the thousands. The daily issuance of new Meme coins is also around 100, with an average of only 20-30 holders. According to tokenterminal data, the average daily active users on Fantom in the past month are around 50,000. Overall, the activity level of the ecosystem still lags behind public chains such as Ethereum and Solana.

Fortunately, Fantom may still have a trump card to drive the activity of the Meme coin market. That is the return of Andre Cronje, who was once a controversial figure in the crypto world, with significant influence. In March 2022, AC announced his departure from Fantom, leading to a 10% drop in YFI and a 20% drop in FTM. However, after AC announced his return to Fantom in November 2022, FTM surged by 44%. Now, AC is once again active on Twitter, starting to promote Fantom, similar to the effect of the founder of Solana promoting Meme coins. Once the so-called DeFi father AC starts promoting Meme coins, it may have a different effect.

Or collaborate with Frax to restore the DeFi ecosystem

The biggest challenge for the restart may still be the aftermath of the Multichain incident, in which the Fantom ecosystem suffered losses accounting for about one-third of the total, approximately $65 million. Recently, the Fantom Foundation applied to the court for the liquidation of the Multichain Foundation to help recover and distribute lost or frozen assets. Nevertheless, the comments section of AC and the Fantom Foundation’s tweets is filled with complaints from users who have suffered losses due to the Multichain incident. Since the Multichain incident, Fantom’s on-chain TVL has rapidly declined from an average of $200 million to around $70 million, and it has only recovered to a peak of $150 million so far.

Among the 254 ecosystem projects listed by Fantom, there are 118 DeFi projects, accounting for nearly half. The recovery of the DeFi ecosystem may be a top priority for Fantom.

On March 28th, Fantom announced the progress of a new round of funding for Sonic, with the first participating angel investor being the founder of Frax Finance. Collaboration with Frax may offer new paths for the recovery of Fantom’s DeFi ecosystem. However, the extent of cooperation between the two parties still needs to be observed.

Currently, there is a growing demand for high-performance, scalable blockchain infrastructure. If Fantom Sonic can achieve its goals of high performance, scalability, and establish an active and diverse ecosystem, it is expected to become a major player in the blockchain infrastructure field.

Surrounded by Strong Competitors, Fantom’s Comeback Remains Uncertain

In the Layer 1 race where Fantom operates, there are formidable opponents such as Ethereum and Solana.

Fantom has adopted highly targeted marketing strategies against these two ecosystem competitors. Firstly, leveraging its performance advantage against parallel EVMs on Ethereum, AC stated on Twitter: “Parallel technology doesn’t even make it to the top three of Fantom’s technical improvements.”

As for Solana, a stronger competitor in terms of performance, Fantom focuses on criticizing Solana’s performance stability. In a report for the first quarter of 2024 circulated by the Fantom Foundation, it was emphasized that Fantom has been operational 99.9% of the time since its launch, whereas Solana’s multiple downtime incidents were highlighted as a significant point of critique.

However, Fantom also faces numerous uncertainties. Although AC’s return has brought some level of activity to Fantom, considering AC’s personality of repeatedly stepping down and then returning, his changes may also become an uncertainty factor for Fantom. If there are significant changes in team members or mistakes in key decisions, it could negatively impact the project’s development and community confidence.

Additionally, Fantom Sonic has not undergone performance validation, and its performance advantages are currently based on testing environments. Since this upgrade is still incomplete, its technical implementation still needs to withstand the tests of real-world applications and large-scale transactions. In April 2023, AC stated that Fantom planned to launch its own crypto bank and intended to do so within the year. However, there have been no developments on this matter to date.

In the fiercely competitive field of blockchain infrastructure and the changing narrative structure of the industry, Fantom faces competition from other Layer 1 and high-performance blockchain projects, which is the biggest market pressure in this round of bull market. As the industry evolves, relying solely on performance metrics as the main narrative is difficult to gain much recognition and has become an undeniable fact. Perhaps Fantom has never lacked narratives, and achieving the vision of these narratives may be more marketable.

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