Fantom (FTM) is once again on the rise. Over the last 3 days it's Total Value Locked (TVL) has gone from ~$130m to ~$200m, drawing near to it's all time high of $256m. This sudden spike in TVL didn't come out of nowhere. Curve, the vastly popular stable swap, launched their Curve Reward APY incentives on Fantom earlier this week. And they are juicy.
Before I get too ahead of myself, if you're like me a few weeks ago, you might be asking yourself - What is Fantom? From their website Fantom is...
...a high-performance, scalable, and secure smart-contract platform.
Which if we're going to be honest, sounds like every blockchain out there. The exciting part about Fantom is their mainnet, Opera, is Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible. Meaning dApps and smart contracts can easily be ported over from Ethereum, similar to Polygon and Binance Smart Chain, two other EVM compatible chains that have recently seen a large increase in usage.
The Opera mainnet uses Fantom (FTM) for gas, similar to how Polygon uses Matic and Binance Smart Chain uses BNB. FTM is currently trading at ~$0.22 with an all time high of $0.94 which was around the same time that every crypto reached it's all time high (pre 19/5/21). Price tends to closely follow ETH, which also closely follows BTC so no real need to show a chart here of their price, if you've seen any crypto price chart you've seen FTM's.
Why Check Fantom Out?
It seems there's a general lull in new projects being released on Polygon, at least for the next couple of weeks, which means that it's a perfect time to solidify your strategy there and dip your toes in a new blockchain. Fantom offers all the familiar trappings of an EVM compatible chain, a few early adopter blue chip platforms (Curve, Cream, SushiSwap) and a few early on the scene native platforms (SpookySwap, SpiritSwap, Tomb).
My opinion is if some of these more blue chip DeFi platforms are developing on Fantom, it's worth me checking out as well. Even if it's only a small portion of my funds. It's extremely difficult to predict what the next "big thing" will be in crypto, my mentality is to try to capture as many early adopter gains as I can.
While Fantom is certainly not new, and has already hit a bit of it's own moon, I believe there's still some good ground to gain with it's DeFi capability and dApps.
Using Fantom Opera
If you're already familiar with BSC, Polygon or xDAI, using Fantom is very similar. Funds can be bridged over from Ethereum, BSC, Polygon or xDAI via a number of bridges. I personally used AnySwap but xPollinate and Multichain offer similar solutions.
Unless you're specifically moving over FTM, when you bridge over assets you will have no gas to move your funds. That's where SpookySwap comes in, they offer a monthly faucet that will send you 0.1 FTM (enough for several transactions) for free via their Discord. It's no wonder they're the largest AMM on Fantom.
For my test I setup my MetaMask to be compatible with the Fantom Opera Mainnet. Which I just found out SpookySwap will do for you if you connect to their exchange.
Farming.jpeg
Because I'm a filthy degenerate the first thing I did after getting funds bridged over and my wallet setup was start looking for some ridiculously high APY farms. That's when Tomb caught my attention. Tomb is the first algorithmic stablecoin on Fantom. Just not in the traditional sense. Their goal is to be pegged to the price of FTM as opposed to the typical algorithmic stablecoin that attempts to be pegged to the USD.
How Tomb attempts to maintain that peg is through a multi-token protocol, with Tomb, Tomb Shares and Tomb Bonds. To be honest though, in this case I was much more drawn to that ridiculous 972% APR (or about 1.5 million APY).
There were a few other options out there, with APYs of up to 500%. I figured though, if I'm going degen, I might as well go full degen and chase the highest yields on Fantom. So I jumped into the FTM-TOMB LP on SpookySwap and dropped my LP tokens in Tomb's cemetery.
So far yields have been as advertised. If you're not as excited about a high risk profile, Curve's rewards on Fantom are also very good. Especially for stablecoin pairs. Personally I also jumped into the BOO-FTM pool. BOO is SpookySwap's token and I believe has some good room for growth. So far there aren't an insane amount of platforms on Fantom but interest in the Blockchain is starting to grow, especially with the recent success of BSC and Polygon.
Final Thoughts
Coming from BSC, Polygon and Ethereum, Fantom is certainly not quite at that level of development/use yet. However the basics are all there. Easy to use bridges, blue chip DeFi projects and solid native platforms all make for a nice experience on Fantom.
Now do I think Fantom will ever achieve the same level of popularity/use of BSC or Polygon? Probably not, only time will tell. But that was never their goal. Fantom markets itself as the Ethereum Helper, as opposed to how some blockchains have titled themselves "Ethereum Killers", with varying results.
The majority of my DeFi assets are still on Polygon, BSC and Ethereum but what I do have on Fantom I'm glad is there. Getting to be relatively early to a growing blockchain and exploring a new ecosystem is fun. Until very recently I'd never ventured into Fantom but I'm very happy I gave it a chance.
Thanks for reading! Obviously I'm no financial advisor, all the above is my opinion and personal experience. If you enjoyed don't forget to like/follow so I know to keep making more content. Happy earnings!
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