Fantom co-founder Andre Cronje hopes to give blockchain technology as we know it, a facelift.
“Blockchain technology is stuck in the 1980s,” he said Declutter. “The internet and technology were then mainly used for financial applications, simply because financial transactions were the only thing that made economic sense to digitize.”
Cronje added that current standards mean these types of transactions now cost a fraction of a cent, something that “would cost you a lot more” on networks like Ethereum. Bitcoin is slower and can also be more expensive, as the market has already seen during the rise of Ordinals.
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His solution? A major upgrade to Fantom’s tech stack called Sonic, optimized, as the name suggests, for speed.
Fantom in its current form is one of many layer-1 blockchain networks Avalanche And Solana aimed at improving speed and reducing costs when issuing internet coins. Fantom launched in 2019 after raising $40 million and uses a variant of the proof of stake consensus mechanism called Lachesis, and is also compatible with Ethereum.
Today, #Fantom is proud to announce the launch of the #FantomSonic testnet environment!
Sonic’s three major upgrades include:
• Fantom Virtual Machine, which offers dramatically faster smart contract execution compared to the old EVM.
• Carmen database storage, which uses a… pic.twitter.com/shovQtzMkd
— Fantom Foundation (@FantomFDN) October 24, 2023
In terms of alleged stats, Sonic Fantom will apparently speed up another 65x, make it easier to launch a node, and reduce network node storage costs. The idea here is to lower the barrier for regular users to secure the network. “We believe it will be of the highest standard in every area,” Cronje said.
To do that, however, they will still have to stake a hefty 50,000 native FTM tokens, which, at current prices, amounts to $11,222, according to CoinGecko data.
As for Sonic’s ideal customer base, Cronje hopes to lure credit card companies and international banks. He was light on names, but told Declutter that he and his team are “having multiple conversations” with such companies.
“The problem with current blockchain technology is that it is slow, unscalable and far too expensive. Institutions don’t build on 56k dial-up and 486 processors for the same reason,” he said. “Technology needs to catch up and we believe Sonic is a step toward evolving what institutions need when leveraging blockchain.”
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Fantom only just rolled out the Sonic testnet yesterday—a kind of sandbox that developers and users can work against a network—but a full launch is expected next spring.
More updates to the testnet are also planned for later this year, and developers are invited to get started experimenting with the network.
Edited by Stephen Graves
