At the time of writing, the bear market for cryptocurrencies is entering a bear market as most Layer 1 altcoins have dipped 20 -- 30% from its all-time highs. In the past month, its native token FTM has seen a surge in price from 121% to $3.02.
Fantom's performance is nothing short of impressive. Total-value locked on Fantom went from $1 billion in September to $7 billion today.
The Fantom Foundation published a list of important milestones that were hit, such as daily transaction counts of 700,000, while its unique addresses continue to increase into the 1.4 million range at the end of 2021.
On August 30th, 2021, the Fantom Foundation launched a massive liquidity mining program of 370 million FTM. Unlike traditional liquidity mining incentives that were directed to users, this FTM liquidity was targeted to Fantom developers as a reward for achieving target levels of TVL on their protocols.
Fantom's strategy of incentivizing developers directly over liquidity providers is part of its plan to establish an attractive foundation for a flourishing dApp ecosystem. It is intended to drive Fantom's developers to create sustainable yield-generating products in the long run, as opposed to incentivizing mercenary liquidity providers to jump from dApp to dApp in pursuit of high yields.
The value of the incentive program was approximately $370 million at the time of the announcement. These incentives have tripled in value to $1.1 billion at FTM's current token price of $3.03.
In the first half of 2021, Fantom developers focused their efforts on building a hospitable dApp environment with collaborations with Chainlink, API 3 and Band Protocol. The Go-Opera update was successfully rolled out in April, allowing the Fantom network to achieve an average time-to-finality of 1 second.
In December 2021, Fantom announced the support of Chainstack, Web 3 infrastructure provider Blocknative, and Open-source oracle provider DIA.
Fantom has also pursued partnerships with government entities around the world. The partnership includes storage of intellectual property records in Ukraine and development of enterprise software for prisons in Pakistan and e-government infrastructure development in Tajikistan to supply chain uses Uzbekistan The Fantom ecosystem hosts a total of 113 protocol projects. According to DeFi Llama, Fantom is ranked sixth behind Ethereum, Terra, Binance Smart Chain, Avalanche and Solana as of 14th January 2022.
Among these protocols are several blue-chip DeFi protocols such as Curve Finance and SushiSwap, as well as other popular dApps like CREAM Finance, Beefy Finance and Abracadabra.
Fantom is slowly courting the GameFi space. Its August campaign was extended to GameFi projects and welcomed Metaverse-related dApps such as 8 BIT World, a play-to- earn video game similar to Decentraland and Sandbox.
Fantom has invested heavily in Tankwars Zone, a sign that it is committed to attracting GameFi developers.
DeFi veteran Andre Cronje, who serves as technical advisor to Fantom, released a series of cryptic tweets in the past week, hinting at an upcoming collaboration with Daniele Sestagalli, the public face behind Wonderland, Abracadabra and Popsicle Finance.