There are at present over 20,000 blockchain tasks available on the market, every competing with the others to achieve market share and dominance. And Because the onset of the crypto bear market, the worth of those tokens have tanked throughout the trade.
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 present buying and selling at $0.22, in line with CoinGecko.
However the down market and crowded subject of competitors haven’t deterred the CEO of Fantom Basis’s hope for the long run.
“Competitors is nice as a result of it could actually 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 multiple blockchain, a number of chains will survive into the long run.
“I believe sooner or later, you may not have 20 or 30 completely different chains… however I believe you may have just a few chains on the market, and I believe they are going to get a big market share,” Kong stated. “Folks use a number of completely different blockchains, that is the case at the moment, and I believe that may proceed to be the case into the long run.”
Launched in December 2019, Fantom is a layer-1 blockchain aiming to supply a substitute for the excessive prices and low speeds Ethereum customers usually 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 functions 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 enhance community throughput or considerably make the know-how much more scalable. However the Ethereum Basis repeatedly got here out and stated no, the aim of the merge is to mainly take away the proof-of-work part 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 rising scalability, not about decreasing gasoline charges dramatically,” Kong stated, regardless of what Ethereum flag-wavers may 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, in the case of our capability to course of transactions asynchronously,” Kong stated.
What issues him most transferring ahead is the alarming current rhetoric from regulators. “I believe the massive unfavourable in the meanwhile is the regulatory uncertainty,” he stated. “I believe that is what’s scaring lots of people [in the industry].”
Kong pointed to the current actions of the SEC, which claimed that every one Ethereum transactions fall below 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 absolutely what may damper innovation, and actually trigger folks to assume twice about blockchain know-how and never need to get into any bother,” he stated. “And so it sort of has a little bit of a chilling impact on the trade.”
