Fantom is the native cryptocurrency of a smart contract blockchain network by the same name that rivals Avalanche, Solana and incumbent market leader Ethereum. It’s known for its high speeds and low costs.

Fantom, which is also known by its ticker FTM, launched in 2019, but the token didn’t gain much traction until 2021. It had hummed along at about $0.20 for a little over two years until the Ethereum blockchain became congested. At that point, the market sought alternative smart contract platforms and FTM blew up. It rose to a high of $3.18 in October 2021, before crashing below a dollar once again in the spring of 2022. The tokens of rival “Ethereum killers” like Solana and Avalanche also fell, but not quite as hard as Fantom.

The price of FTM appears to depend on the success of Fantom, the smart contract-enabled blockchain it powers. If nobody uses Fantom’s decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, then few will need FTM, the token used to process transactions. Of course, Fantom’s DeFi protocols will be used if the blockchain is cheaper and faster than its rivals and the project manages to attract top talent.

Fantom is also an inflationary token, meaning that the total number of FTM tokens will increase over time, but only up until a point – the token’s supply is fixed at 3.175 billion. Once all of the tokens have been issued, which crypto data platform Messari predicts will occur in 2024, no more FTM tokens will be introduced into circulation.

New tokens enter circulation in two ways. The first is when early investors and founders are allowed to use tokens they own, subject to vesting schedules. The second method is for stakers to earn FTM as a reward for confirming transactions on the blockchain. Yields change over time, but are designed to decrease when the network is more popular and increase with longer lockup periods.

Fantom is a smart contract blockchain designed to be faster and cheaper than alternatives like Ethereum. Unlike Ethereum, Fantom operates by way of a directed acyclic graph (DAG), similar to Hedera Hashgraph. With DAGs, transaction histories are expressed as graphs of blockchain hashes.

Also unlike the case with Ethereum, Fantom’s proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, Lachesis, is leaderless. This means that it can operate transactions independently rather than handling batches of transactions as they come in.

Like Avalanche and Binance Smart Chain, Fantom is also compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, meaning that developers can easily move their projects over to Ethereum. Popular platforms include Fantom Finance, Geist Finance and SpookySwap.

Fantom launched its main network called Opera in December 2019. It has raised $40 million in funding, including $2.7 million from an initial coin offering in June 2018.

One of Fantom’s leading contributors was Andre Cronje, the DeFi developer who created Yearn Finance. Fantom’s price dropped 15% the day after Cronje and his colleague, Anton Nell, a senior solutions architect at Fantom, announced their departure from DeFi in March 2022.