Nowadays, the crypto industry projects which want to be competitive and win the hearts and minds of investors need to deliver real utility. Fantom is a platform that brings a lot of value to developers working on decentralized applications and smart contracts. As a result, the native currency of Fantom, FTM, is a sought-after asset on the market. Fantom continues to gain publicity in the crypto community, and every day, new crypto enthusiasts decide to add some FTM coins to their portfolios. Read this article to learn more about Fantom and how you can accept FTM as payment.
Key Points:
- Fantom is a secure, scalable, and decentralized platform providing infrastructure to dApps.
- FTM is the native cryptocurrency of Fantom, which is used for governance, fees, payments, and other purposes.
- NOWPayments offers tools for accepting FTM payments and donations.
What is Fantom?
Blockchain trilemma
Before jumping into the nitty-gritty of Fantom, it is important to mention some historical facts. The launch of Bitcoin revolutionized the sphere of finance forever and constituted a big step forward in terms of technology and more efficient society. At the same time, as every pioneering product, Bitcoin had many issues, and one of them was that it had limited scalability. The design of Bitcoin practically prevents it from adjusting its scale depending on the current circumstances.
Although, since the introduction of Bitcoin, the crypto industry has made huge progress, projects continue to encounter the blockchain trilemma, a challenge that forces projects to make trade-offs between three components: scalability, decentralization, and security.
Bitcoin chooses to focus on decentralization and security while leaving scalability out of the question. As a result, the Bitcoin blockchain is not the best one in terms of transaction speed confirmation. So, it is not really convenient to use BTC to send day-to-day payments, transfer data, or trade assets.
Fantom solution
The modern financial system is driven by speed, which means that all operations must be carried out efficiently. Therefore, the solutions powering the financial system require high throughput and fast finality. Decentralizing these services at scale while maintaining bank-grade security poses a challenge for the whole blockchain industry.
Nevertheless, thanks to its technology, Fantom successfully tackles this problem. At the core of Fantom, there is a high-speed consensus mechanism, Lachesis. The mechanism allows digital assets to operate at rocket speeds and delivers massive improvements over the current systems.
Most notably, Fantom finds a way to overcome the trilemma by avoiding sacrificing security and decentralization in favor of scalability. Thanks to its modular architecture, Fantom provides tools for full customization of blockchains for digital assets, with different characteristics tailored to their specific use-cases.
Fantom also offers the highest grade of security by relying on a leaderless Proof-of-Stake protocol to secure the network.
Fantom’s aBFT consensus, called Lachesis, can scale to many nodes around the world in a permissionless, open environment, providing a good degree of decentralization. The consensus does not use Delegated Proof-of-Stake, and has no concept of “Masternodes.”
What are the benefits of Fantom?
Security and sustainability
Fantom upholds the highest standards of security and uses Proof-of-Stake. The utilization of PoS also helps Fantom to be an environment-friendly platform that manages to protect decentralization without wasting electricity.
Lachesis delivers institutional-grade security to distributed networks. Additionally, Fantom guarantees absolute finality, meaning that transactions can never be reversed like in networks with probabilistic finality.
The consensus mechanism is so scalable that it can grow to hundreds of nodes, boosting decentralization and security.
Lachesis is also leaderless to prevent it from relying on a small set of actors.
Open-source
Fantom is an open-source platform where building blocks can be used and customized by anyone to fit their needs. The open-source commitment of Fantom means that its code is fully transparent and available on Github.
Open-participation
Fantom is open for everyone since it is permissionless, so any person can run a Fantom node.
Fantom’s Opera Chain provides infrastructure for practically an unlimited number of validator nodes that can participate in securing the network, as long as they stake the right amount.
Fantom Tokenomics
FTM is the native cryptocurrency of the Fantom platform, with a total supply of 3.175 billion. It has several functions on the network and outside it:
Securing the network
The main utility of the FTM token is the provision of security to the network through a Proof-of-Stake system. To become a validator node, users need to hold a minimum of 500,000 FTM. Stakers have to lock up their FTM. In return, both nodes and stakers are rewarded with epoch rewards and fees.
Payments
The FTM token is also perfect for sending and receiving payments. The Fantom network has a high throughput, fast finality, and low fees. On Fantom, transactions take around 1 second and cost about $0.01. If you want to receive FTM as payments or donations, you can use NOWPayments’ services.
On-chain governance and fees
FTM provides its owners with the right to participate in on-chain governance. Since Fantom is a permissionless project which does not have any leaders and has a decentralized ecosystem, all decisions regarding Fantom are made using the on-chain governance tool. Stakers can propose and vote for changes and improvements. FTM is also utilized for network fees.
Is Fantom a good investment?
As mentioned earlier, the Fantom platform is unique since it balances scalability, decentralization, and security without compromising on any of the three. In this sense, Fantom possesses a technology which is superior to Bitcoin and even Ethereum, as well as a plethora of many other projects. The high utility of Fantom is evidenced by the extensive use of the platform by many notable crypto projects, including SushiSwap, Curve, Solidly, and many others.
So, Fantom is a popular platform which is expected to grow even further and amass even a larger number of projects using its infrastructure. This means that Fantom has excellent prospects and certainly can be considered by investors who want to get an asset that will yield them profits in the long run.
How to buy Fantom
Fantom is featured on many mainstream exchanges. For instance, you can purchase it on Binance, Gemini, FTX, Crypto.com, etc. For example, to get FTM on Binance, you need to follow these steps:
- First, you will need to register on Binance and verify your account;
- Then, you will have to add your card to your account.
- Next, you will need to specify the amount of FTM you wish to buy and make a purchase with the fiat currency of your choice.
How to get Fantom payments
As was mentioned above, businesses and individuals can begin to accept FTM payments and donations. In order to start featuring a Fantom payment gateway, you only need to register on the official website of NOWPayments and choose your preferred way of accepting FTM payments and donations.
FAQ
Conclusion
Fantom is an innovative platform that solves the blockchain trilemma and brings a lot of utility to crypto projects. Fantom is used by numerous decentralized projects as a platform that provides them with the necessary infrastructure. FTM is the native token of Fantom, which has different functions on the network. Businesses and individuals can accept FTM as payment or donations using NOWPayments.