Blockchain
There are at the moment over 20,000 blockchain initiatives in the marketplace, every competing with the others to realize market share and dominance. And Because the onset of the crypto bear market, the worth of those tokens have tanked throughout the business.
For now, Fantom is among the many comparatively better-known chains. Its FTM token (No. 67 by market cap) is down 93% since its all-time excessive of $3.46 on October 28, 2021, and at the moment buying and selling at $0.22, based on CoinGecko.
However the down market and crowded discipline of competitors haven’t deterred the CEO of Fantom Basis’s hope for the longer term.
“Competitors is nice as a result of it could get you a greater outcome, higher know-how,” Fantom Basis CEO Michael Kong instructed Decrypt at Chainlink SmartCon in New York this week, including that as a result of crypto customers have gotten used to utilizing a couple of blockchain, a number of chains will survive into the longer term.
“I believe sooner or later, you won’t have 20 or 30 completely different chains… however I believe you will have a couple of chains on the market, and I believe they’ll get a big market share,” Kong mentioned. “Folks use a number of completely different blockchains, that is the case right this moment, and I believe that can proceed to be the case into the longer term.”
What’s Fantom? The Quick Blockchain Taking over Ethereum
Launched in December 2019, Fantom is a layer-1 blockchain aiming to supply an alternative choice to the excessive prices and low speeds Ethereum customers typically complain about and hoped that the now-completed Ethereum merge would resolve. Layer-1 protocols like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana make the most of their very own blockchain, permitting decentralized purposes to be constructed atop their protocol.
On September 15, Ethereum accomplished its long-awaited transition from the energy-intensive proof-of-work consensus algorithm to the extra environmentally pleasant proof-of-stake consensus mechanism.
However ETH is down 320% since then, and Kong believes many within the Ethereum neighborhood did not fairly perceive what the merge would imply.
“I believe lots of people had been anticipating, wrongly, locally, that the Ethereum merge would considerably improve community throughput or considerably make the know-how much more scalable. However the Ethereum Basis repeatedly got here out and mentioned no, the aim of the merge is to principally take away the proof-of-work element of the chain.”
For Kong, the misconceptions surrounding the merge had extra to do with the neighborhood’s pleasure and fewer with any mistake by the Ethereum Basis in managing expectations.
The merge was “not about growing scalability, not about lowering fuel charges dramatically,” Kong mentioned, regardless of what Ethereum flag-wavers might need hoped. Any disappointment folks have within the aftermath “wasn’t actually the fault of anybody, specifically, or the Ethereum Basis, who had been simply telling folks the reality,” he added.
And as for a way Fantom can compete with Ethereum and different chains? “We nonetheless have our aggressive benefit, at the least in the intervening time, on the subject of our skill to course of transactions asynchronously,” Kong mentioned.
What considerations him most transferring ahead is the alarming latest rhetoric from regulators. “I believe the massive damaging in the mean time is the regulatory uncertainty,” he mentioned. “I believe that is what’s scaring lots of people [in the industry].”
Kong pointed to the latest actions of the SEC, which claimed that each one Ethereum transactions fall beneath U.S. jurisdiction, and the CFTC, which sued Ooki DAO and its founders final week.
“To me, the regulatory uncertainty about who’s supposed to manage what, just like the SEC and the CFTC publicly disputing with each other, is admittedly what may damper innovation, and actually trigger folks to assume twice about blockchain know-how and never wish to get into any bother,” he mentioned. “And so it form of has a little bit of a chilling impact on the business.”
