In order to achieve the grand goal of Mass Adoption, Block chain technology continues to innovate and provide continuous innovative solutions. Compared to the architecture design of a standalone Block chain, modular Block chain greatly enhances the scalability, flexibility, and security of the network by decomposing the core functions of the Block chain, paving the way for the large-scale adoption of the Block chain.

As one of the leaders in the modular blockchain solution, Fuel plans to launch its Mainnet in the early fourth quarter of this year. Public information shows that Fuel received an $80 million investment led by Blockchain Capital and Stratos in September 2022, with participation from CoinFund, Maven11, Bain Capital Crypto, Spartan Group, Alameda Research, and other institutions.

This article will analyze the development process, technical features, team background, and ecological construction of the Fuel project in Depth, and list some ecological projects for users.

Fuel Development History

In the eyes of the FUEL team, the strength and prosperity of the Ethereum ecosystem have the potential to become a huge force for Decentralization world computer. However, at the same time, the issue of rise has not been properly addressed in the past few years. Although Ethereum's modular blockchain and L2 solutions have certain advantages in scalability, they have also brought challenges in terms of fragmentation, interoperability, and cannot meet the ever-changing real demands of Ethereum with Rollup at its core.

Based on this situation, Fuel has created a new architecture called Rollup OS specifically designed for the needs of ETH Rollup. This system combines the strongest features of previous blockchains, including BTC's UTXO model, Solana's parallelism, Ethereum's security, Move's asset-oriented design, Cosmos' interoperability and VM customization, aiming to achieve high performance and minimal state, providing developers with customization and security, while offering users a seamless experience.

The Fuel project was established in 2019, and in the past 5 years, the team has completed major iterations from V1 to V2. Although Fuel V1 was the first Optimistic Rollup solution on the Ethereum mainnet, it was actually a simple solution proposed to address the scaling problem of Ethereum, achieving scalability by adopting a different execution model than the Ethereum Virtual Machine. However, due to the limited use cases and lack of support for Smart Contracts in Fuel V1, it did not gain widespread popularity among users after its launch. Therefore, shortly after its launch, the Fuel development team shifted all development focus to the V2 version and positioned it as a modular execution layer.

FUEL Team and Financing

The Fuel team is an international, distributed organization whose core members include co-founder and CEO Nick Dodson, co-founder John Adler, and chief rise officer Arjun Kalsy. Among them, John Adler is also a co-founder of Celestia, Dodson is also an early participant in the Ethereum ecosystem, and Arjun Kalsy has also worked on the rise of ecosystems related to Polygon and Mantle, introducing more than 50,000 decentralized applications and completing the ecological construction of multiple projects from 0 to 1.

In terms of financing, in addition to the mentioned investment of $80 million, FUEL also completed a seed round financing of $1.5 million in 2021, led by CoinFund, with participation from Fenbushi Capital, Origin Capital, and Blockwall.

Core Features of FUEL

Fuel is a feature-rich blockchain operating system designed specifically for ETH Rollup, and it consists of the following main components:

1. Virtual Machine FUEL VM

FuelVM is the core of Fuel, and all the core functions of Fuel (such as parallelization, state minimization, and customizability) are derived from VM.

As an improvement to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), Fuel parallelizes transaction execution by using a strict state access list in the form of the UTXO model, simplifying state access and reducing contention in parallel processing, thus providing powerful processing capabilities. With FuelVM, Fuel Nodes can identify the accounts involved in transactions and map out dependencies before execution, allowing Fuel to utilize more CPU threads and cores typically idle in single-threaded blockchains. As a result, Fuel can offer more computing, state access, and transaction throughput than single-thread products.

2. Programming language Sway

Sway, developed by the Fuel team, is a programming language designed specifically for building smart contracts. It combines the best features of Solidity and Rust, enabling developers to easily deliver high-performance code to meet the demands of high-computing environments.

On the one hand, Sway adopts the concept of Solidity Smart Contract paradigm language, which has built-in top-level contract storage and Block chain mechanism, and can realize contract programming that conforms to ergonomics and security. Compared with Solidity, Sway provides a more advanced type system with features, enumerations, and generics.

On the other hand, Sway prioritizes compile-time analysis and security by providing static analysis features, similar to Rust's borrow checker and safety-first semantics. In addition, it also has Rust's syntax.

3. Integrated Tool Chain Forc

The Forc toolchain allows developers to easily build and deploy Dapps on the Fuel on-chain. By providing a series of comprehensive and clear documents and development toolkits, such as: SDKs and APIs, developers can get a fully vertically integrated experience, such as building the framework for new projects, formatting, running scripts, deploying contracts, testing contracts, and so on.

Based on this trap complete operating system, the Fuel team hopes to provide a seamless and developer-friendly experience for developers from Web2 and Web3, and also hopes to break through the modular boundaries through Rollup OS and bring the best features of other Layer1 back to the ETH ecosystem.

FUEL Development Roadmap

Fuel's strong development capability is crucial for the continuous development of its ecosystem support. At the end of May this year, Fuel officially launched the final test network on Sepolia. According to official sources, it has attracted nearly 2 million users, created 1 million contracts, and processed 25 million+ transactions within 3 months.

In order to fully guarantee the security of user funds, Fuel partnered with Immunefi in June and July this year to launch a $1.3 million bug bounty security audit program to identify potential vulnerabilities in the Fuel codebase before Mainnet. As of early June, Fuel has undergone five internal security audits and passed independent evaluations by top audit firms, including Trail of Bits, Ottersec, ChainSecurity, and Hexens.

At this stage, the team is orderly advancing the Mainnet launch plan and planning to have more media exposure for the project in the future. In addition, FUEL has also launched a reward points program, which runs through all stages of the FUEL network deployment, from the public test network to Mainnet, to reward every user who contributes to the development of the FUEL network and ecosystem.

Fuel Ecology Project Inventory

In order to attract more developers, Fuel has launched a quarterly sponsorship program to provide comprehensive support such as funding, technology, marketing, and legal support for outstanding projects. So far, Fuel's ecosystem has more than 40 projects covering various fields such as Non-fungible Token, Decentralized Finance, Oracle Machine, stablecoin protocol, Wallet, cross-chain bridges, and Derivatives.

(Source: @bakosafe)

Below is a brief introduction to some projects:

Spark

Spark is a full-chain order book trading platform built on the Fuel network, providing Spot and futures trading. Spark was founded in 2023. In May of this year, Spark completed a $1.5 million Pre-Seed round of financing, with P2 Ventures, Fuel, Unicorn Ventures, Curiosity Capital, and Ajit Tripathi participating.

Spark has the following main features:

1. Rapid execution: achieve rapid Settlement and minimal fees for fast trading;

2. Self-custody and fund security: Users can self-custody their funds during transactions;

3. Optimal Pricing: Based on FUEL to obtain sufficient Liquidity to achieve optimal pricing;

4. Community management: The DAO treasury is about to go online, and Spark traders will govern together to achieve community-driven governance.

Spark's goal is to provide a platform to accelerate the development of Decentralized Finance on the Ethereum blockchain, bringing in more types of products for Algorithm traders and building an efficient platform for market makers and Liquidity Providers. In order to achieve these goals, the team has launched a market maker incentive program, where market makers can earn points-based rewards based on their monthly volume, and specific Service Level Agreements (SLAs) have been developed for market makers to ensure liquidity and efficient trading.

Fuelet

Fuelet is a Fuel ecosystem self-hosted Wallet, focusing on user experience and enhancing security through Fuel account abstraction. Founded in 2022, Fuelet is currently the only Fuel Wallet that supports both mobile and web platforms. Fuelet supports asset storage, sending and exchanging, and also allows users to browse Dapps in the Wallet, and pay Gas fees with any Token.

Users can use the Cloud Backup feature provided by Fuelet to create a new Wallet in seconds without manually saving the mnemonic. In addition, users can also turn their iPhone into a hardware wallet using the Hardware Signer feature.

Thunder

Thunder is the first on-chain Non-fungible Token (NFT) marketplace of FUEL network, supporting batch listing and purchasing to simplify the management and trading process of NFTs. Thunder was established in 2022 and won the FUEL bounty at ETHBerlin hackathon. In June last year, Thunder released the beta version.

Swaylend

Swaylend is the first lending protocol of the Fuel network, allowing users to earn passive income by providing Liquidity to the market. Swaylend uses the Sway language, but it still retains some core logic as it is a fork of Compound V3.

The Swaylend platform is built around the underlying asset market, allowing users to supply underlying assets and earn interest or borrow underlying assets and pay interest in a single asset. For example, in the USDC market, USDC acts as the underlying asset that users can borrow or supply. On September 17, Swaylend completed a contract audit supported by Halborn.

PlayEstates

PlayEstates brings real estate on-chain, the first RWA project supported by the Fuel network. The team's mission is to revolutionize real estate investment by enabling global investors to easily own and invest in high-value U.S. real estate, intellectual property, investment funds, etc. through pioneering tokenization as a service (TaaS). All PlayEstates transactions are insured, verified, authenticated, and comply with regulatory requirements such as SEC, CFTC, FinCEN, etc.

PlayEstates is incubated by Web3Labs with NEO, ThreeDAO with Hashkey, and Water Drip Capital. According to the latest disclosure by the team, PlayEstates is focusing on product improvements and preparing for a key round of financing.

Fluid Protocol

Fluid Protocol is an over-collateralization, Decentralization borrowing platform based on the Fuel ecosystem, dedicated to meeting protocol users' demand for stable Digital Money on Fuel. Fluid Protocol supports partial liquidation.

USDF is an over-collateralized native stablecoin built on the Fuel network, where borrowers can obtain interest-free loans by depositing Collateral, with the loan being paid in USDF and must maintain a fixed minimum collateralization ratio (135%). USDF is a soft peg digital asset, equivalent to the dollar at a 1:1 ratio.

Fuel Name Service

Fuel Name Service is the decentralized domain name service of the Fuel network, which allows users to create .fuel Addresses.

Mira

Mira is an Open Source Decentralization platform aimed at seamlessly matching traders, Liquidity Providers (LP), and protocol. Mira was initially launched based on AMM (AMM) and will later transition to the ve(3,3) model to maximize capital efficiency and user incentives.

According to the team's roadmap, Mira has currently implemented basic AMM functionality with volatility and stable swap functions in the Testnet. After the Fuel Mainnet goes live, it will also be synchronized to operate on the Mainnet, and start the Mira Dapps point plan. By early 2025 at the latest, Mira will implement ve(3,3) functionality and governance.

From the current stage of the Fuel ecosystem project, the vast majority are in the early development stage, with little innovation in terms of functionality and services, and relatively few testnet users. However, Fuel is expected to go live on Mainnet in the early fourth quarter of this year, which may bring about a different scene, and we still have high expectations for it.