Fantom

Fantom (FTM) is the native cryptocurrency of the Fantom smart contract blockchain which focuses on scalability and aims to provide higher speeds and lower costs than competitors like Ethereum.

FTM is used for staking, voting, making payments and covering transaction fees on Fantom.

Pseudonymous founder Satoshi Nakamoto devised Bitcoin as a decentralized, peer-to-peer network, able to facilitate financial transactions without a central authority like a government or bank. In doing so, Satoshi solved a key issue, the double-spending problem, by creating a proof-of-work consensus mechanism within a blockchain structure. 

Bitcoin’s network was activated in January 2009 when Satoshi mined the first block, or the “genesis block” and 50 BTC entered circulation at a price of $0.00. Fifty bitcoin continued to enter circulation every block (created once every 10 minutes) until the first halving event took place in November 2012. Halvings which are programmed into Bitcoin’s code by Satoshi involve automatically halving the number of new BTC entering circulation every 210,000 blocks.

Bitcoin has a fixed supply of 21 million and no more bitcoin can be created and units of bitcoin cannot be destroyed. Each bitcoin is made up of 100 million satoshis (the smallest units of bitcoin), making individual bitcoin divisible up to eight decimal places. That means anyone can purchase a fraction of a bitcoin with as little as one U.S. dollar.

In 2006 development began by an anonymous computer programmer or group of programmers under the pseudonym “Satoshi Nakamoto.” Satoshi subsequently published a whitepaper outlining the network’s framework and operation in 2008 titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” In January 2009, the Bitcoin network launched its 0.1 release.

Fantom aims to overcome the “blockchain trilemma” and make improvements across decentralization, security, and scalability with its proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism called Lachesis. Lachesis is leaderless, meaning it can operate transactions independently rather than handling batches of transactions as they come in. It also offers finality and provides Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance (ABFT) which allows the chain to scale without compromising on security. Lachesis also improves transaction settlement; sending FTM on the network takes one second to clear and costs fractions of a penny to process.

Fantom is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, meaning that developers can easily move their projects over to Ethereum. However unlike Ethereum, Fantom operates by way of a directed acyclic graph (DAG). With DAGs, transaction histories are expressed as graphs of blockchain hashes without the need for blocks.