31st January, 2022 — In another edition of Bitrue’s Twitter Spaces AMA, we invited Sam Harcourt who heads the Business Development division at Fantom Foundation as our guest. Fantom is a high-performance, scalable, EVM-compatible, and secure smart contract platform. Fantom’s mainnet deployment, Fantom Opera, is built on Fantom’s consensus mechanism, Lachesis. Fantom is a decentralized and Byzantine fault tolerant Layer one blockchain protocol that delivers fast transaction speeds, low transaction costs, and deterministic finality, all while remaining permissionless, decentralized, and open-sourced.
Without further ado, let’s dive into the main Q&A’s of the session below:
Q1. Can you give us a quick introduction about Fantom and yourself?
My name is Sam Harcourt. I’m on the BD side within the Foundation. My day-to-day includes DApp support, handling inbound queries from new developers, teams, governments, and institutions, coordinating support from the foundation, and helping internal operations craft governance proposals. Additionally, I help with chasing outbound leads for promoting the Fantom chain outside the Web3 space. We are also excitedly bringing on a new VP of Business Development who will help push our traction within that part. To put it simply, Fantom is a decentralized blockchain platform for builders to launch their DApps and creative models on. What we’ve been doing for the last four years is running with a 99% uptime. We are Solidly and Vyper compatible, and we are notably top 10 chain by both TVL and activity. I say activity, I mean users, transactions, and contracts deployed on the network. So, yeah, that’s a little bit about myself, what I get up to, and a TLDR on the Fantom chain.
Q2. What differentiates Fantom as Layer One project? What are some of the key characteristics of Fantom that people should know about as Layer One?
Right now, crypto is still at its grassroots. Before I get into what makes us different, I think there are going to be multiple industry leaders that evolve from this stage, including many different L1s and different types of DApps. But, our focus at Fantom is building a one-platform DApp solution. So, we aren’t focused on side chains or L2s or subnets. Instead, what we aim to do is share that security and liquidity within the one hub. Then, within that, we can offer a wide range of different benefits for builders so they can create different types of sustainable business models.
What separates us, is that we are an eco-friendly chain where each transaction uses less electricity than your average Visa payment. We have the fastest confirmation times with a sub-second time for true finality (900 milliseconds). True finality means there isn’t a longer chain rules or having to worry about reorgs.. When you submit your transaction and the block is finalized, that’s it, there are no reorgs. What that does for our builders is it enables them to give a smoother UX for their users.
I think what’s pretty interesting right now is we have a lot of attention on competition between L1s (e.g. Ethereum versus Fantom, Solana versus Fantom, Polygon versus BNB, etc). But what I see coming is more DApp competition is starting to take place regardless of what chain they are on. With the increasing Bridging capabilities, we are slowly merging all Web 3 users into the same consumer pool. And as the network moats start to fall away, a user won’t just spend time on Fantom to send transactions to themselves, but what they want are products and smart contracts and really cool dApps to interact with or even communities to be a part of. So, at Fantom, our mission is to focus on the builders. It’s to give our builders the tools and abilities so that they can compete and have an advantage when competing for market share just because they’re deployed on Fantom.
If we can help them win, then as a network, we’ll succeed. Because these models that we are putting in place are more sustainable, it means they can have a longer-lasting business model that gives the chain a longer-lasting business model itself. To dive into that more, we’ll have to talk about gas monetization. So, Andre came up with this idea internally and we just passed it through our governance recently. Basically, you can earn 15% of all the gas that is spent on your contracts. This gets me so excited (although it sounds simple) because what it can do is provide our builders with a new sustainable revenue stream through the activity they generate.
So similar to what you would see on a channel on YouTube, where the channel shares the ad revenue with the platform. But in this case, it’s even better. For instance, on YouTube, they’re very strict about what you can say. If you go against their “community standards”, they can demonetize you with a click of a button and there goes your revenue. Comparatively, our goal is to remove ourselves from the process so that you can begin to earn on Fantom without needing any sort of Foundation approval. You can just worry about being yourself and you can choose whatever market you want to grow in.
So that is something I love about the decentralized network’s ethos. You don’t have to get anyone’s approval to build something that people want.
You can even compare earning standards. While this isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison, on YouTube, your average channel gets anywhere between $0.05-$0.06 per thousand views. If the average transaction on Fantom is about $0.01, then every thousand transactions compared to 1000 views is $10 with gas monetization, you would earn $1.50. So compared to YouTube, you can earn 30x more on Fantom from your user base compared to your viewer base on Youtube. Just like how YouTube spurred the start of this whole creator economy and influencers, we’re pushing forward with the next generation of what you can build and earn online. I can’t even imagine what this is going to be like in 10 to 15 years.
Another point which makes us unique, I’d say is what Andre and Michael have crafted over the last four years is a very sustainable and long treasury for the foundation itself. So, we have a 30-year runway from the foundation. What this does is it gives people who build on Fantom ease of mind when they’re creating on a platform that they know is going to have ongoing support in a few decades. If you put yourself in a developer’s shoes and put all this time and effort into building on a platform, but the Foundation, maybe spent all this money on sponsorships or big-name partnerships and end up disappearing because their treasury is empty. As a developer, it puts you in a bit of an awkward situation and will set you back because then you have to go find a new network or continue building on a network that’s not going to be supported.
Fantom is growing at a very fast pace. Some of the tech announcements that were made by Michael Kong at the Quantum Miami Conference were quite incredible. Just having that constant support on the chain, it’s a very big plus for those who want to compete. Again, going back to that other point I mentioned, we’re going to see DApp-on-DApp competition grow. So, you will want to build on a platform that is going to give you tools to have an advantage when you’re going against other DEXs on other platforms, or other lending and borrowing protocols.
Those are some things that make us different.
Q3. What are some of the major milestones that you guys have achieved since inception? And with 2022 being a relatively turbulent year, were you able to still achieve what you wanted to on the road map?
On the BD side, we have passed some amazing governance votes. One of those was the gas monetization I mentioned before. Another one would be the Vaults, which I’ll go into more later. And those I believe, are going to give a lot of tooling and pathways for capital for developers on Fantom, which I think is a massive win. We’ve been focused on streamlining our inbound queries so we can offer DApps that deploy on Fantom a range of support, including different types of co-marketing, such as jumping on our new podcast that we launched called Vertical Blocks, which is run by Juan, he’s a great host and is focused on exploring all the cool builders on Fantom.
Additionally, we offer 24/7 support for builders so when they launch on Fantom, we can help with any kind of network-related queries they may have, even about their smart contract deployments. We launched Dedaub and what it does is create a safer environment on Fantom. Dedaub is a continuous contract which continuously examines the contract code at all levels, including the bytecode against a Contract Library. So, if there’s any vulnerability that is added, and you’re not covered, DeDaub will be able to alert you straight away if you’re being monitored.
On the tech side, I won’t dive too much into it because Michael Kong did an amazing speech recently at Quantum Miami where he covered a lot of this. I’m just going to go straight to the really fun stuff around the storage and virtual machine work that they’ve done. To cover some key points, what they have been able to achieve from testing the data from the last 40–50 million blocks from the mainnet was showing about a 10x improvement on throughput, which is just incredible. The performance tested to be about 8.1 times faster than what we currently have on our middleware with over 4000 transactions per second maintaining that time to finality. This data pulls the averages of all transaction types. So, if you’re only having simple P2P transactions this would be significantly above this.
But this is an average. So it includes if you have very complicated high computation executions. So that was really cool to see, expect that to be launched this year. The other cool thing he mentioned was the reduction in storage space needed for a validator node. Currently, you need about 1.2 or 1.3 terabytes of data and after this, you’ll need about 98% less storage, around 25GB running the same setup, which is just an incredible amount of reduction. That’s some of our milestones.
Q4. With these milestones having been achieved, is there anything in particular on your roadmap for 2023? Are you guys getting ready for anything this year?
Moving ahead with the milestones on the BD side, what we’re focused on is bringing on our new VP of Business Development. So, just like we 10x our performance within the Fantom network, we want to do the same within our outbound queries and DApp support on the BD side.
On the tech front, Andre released a great overview covering a lot of what to expect. This includes milestones such as account abstraction. We’ve seen some work on account abstraction on Ethereum with EIP, I think it’s 4337, this is done specifically to avoid the consensus layer, whereas our target is to have it on the consensus layer. Now I’m still learning more about this, but essentially, what account abstraction is you have EOAs, which are externally owned accounts and these are typical accounts that you have when you’re interacting within the Fantom network, such as your wallet, whether it’s MetaMask or what you may use. But, what we want to see are contract accounts. So, these are smart contracts that cannot initiate transactions themselves. A wallet would be required to send some sort of transaction to interact with that smart contract. And this opens up a wide range of new tools for developers like social recovery and interacting with more Web 2 interfaces that you would be used to. Additionally, it would enable other functions such as economic abstraction, which is the ability for users to pay transaction fees in other tokens such as Fantom. So, those are some pretty big ones that we will aim to achieve this year.
Q5. You mentioned something about funding pathways for developers earlier. Could you share a little bit about that?
Sure. What we’ve been really focused on is a developer or DApp will only deploy somewhere with the right incentive. No one would work for free, or at least not forever. So, what we want to do is build out different pathways for developers to get access to capital at the different stages that they’re at as a builder. So, whether you’re at the very seed stage or maybe you’re at a bit later (already having a user base). We want to be able to provide you with a pathway to get access to that capital. So, to kick start it, we did partner with Gitcoin, being the first chain after Ethereum for them to deploy, we successfully ended our first Beta around with them.
We had a matching amount from the Foundation of about 125,000 Fantom. We also saw a massive, almost 290,000 Fantom donated from the community from over 16,000 users. We’re finalizing the round soon and hopefully, be able to distribute that very soon to the teams. But as a starting round, this is an amazing result with a comparatively small amount of Fantom as the matching amount. It was a really cool way to see different projects, especially on the smaller side, get access to that capital as well as get support from the community.
Another cool thing, which I did slightly mention before, is the Vault. The Vault is essentially a contract address which takes in 10% of all transaction fees on the Fantom network and it holds them. And then what people can do is apply for those fees or the Fantom for anything that they would like. So whatever you build, whatever you think would benefit the Fantom network, you can make an application through the governance proposal and you can request a certain amount of Fantom that is sitting in that Vault. As we’re talking now, we have about 90,000 Fantom sitting in there and it grows at about 1000–2000 Fantom a day. Essentially, this is going to get bigger and bigger with more and more network activity happening on chain. People can again, apply for any reason.
So, say if you want to build a really cool DApp that we haven’t seen before, you can apply through governance to get the funding to build that out. What you need is about 55% both Governance approval and turnout. And then we’re going to use LlamaPay to send the funds to you. We’ll look to automate this process to take the foundation completely out of it, but for now, we will have to manually do it. Again, this is so exciting because you can build whatever you want, you just need the network to approve. And the more time that goes past, the bigger the Vault gets.
This has a flywheel effect, which brings more people to Fantom, which has increasing activity, which again has a bigger amount for people to apply for, and then we’ll just grow and grow. Hopefully, we’ll see someone apply and get a successful application soon. It has only been open for a couple of weeks now. So, I’m really excited to see what that will kind of turn into as we go down the year.
Lastly, I did mention this a lot before, which was the gas monetization program where you can earn 15% of the revenue from your smart contracts you deploy. I think I talked about that enough already, but I’m very excited to see how that grows out this year. Additionally, we do have the VC Ecosystem Partners list where we have about eight to nine different VC partners who we send decks to that are given to us. So, if you’re raising at the seed or Series A stage, you can send us your deck presentation and then we pass it on to our partners. If they like what you have and want to invest, we’ll make an introduction. Obviously, these are all third parties, so we can’t promise that you will get any type of funding from them. But being able to use the foundation as a connection point for you is another thing that we want to offer those who build on Fantom. Yeah, so that’s all the kind of funding pathways that we’ve put in place. That’s pretty exciting to see how they all roll out this year.
Q6. Before ending this AMA session, is there anything else, in particular, you would like to share with our community about Fantom?
Sure thing. We recently announced a new Hackathon with a Devpost. It’s $50,000 US in total, so please check that out and apply if you’d like to be a part of it. It has a range of different categories, so you can win whether it’s an NFT project or a number of different categories. That’s something to look at.
Apart from that, if you have any questions or want to get in contact with the Fantom Foundation, please contact info@fantom.foundation or contact@fantom.foundation. Or you can even reach me on Telegram which is @samharc and we can chat about the support that I’ve mentioned today.
