State of the Opera – August 2022

Welcome, Fantom fanatics, to the August edition of State of the Opera. The newsletter that covers the news and events that have graced the Fantom Opera ecosystem this month. This installment will highlight some powerful partnerships, unforgettable upgrades, and the latest news from the Fantom Foundation. 

If you have any questions, concerns, or comments, feel free to reach out on Twitter or Discord if you’re interested in writing an article for Lrn.Fi, send me a message on Twitter @Brickfrog_0 or find me on the Byte Mason discord.

State of the Opera

Protocol	TVL on FTM Network (USD)	MCap/TVL
Beethoven X (BEETS)	$58M  [-10.1%]	0.08
Spooky Swap (BOO)	$122M   [+6%]	0.19
Geist Finance (GEIST)	$40M [-13.7%]	0.03
Liquid Driver (LQDR)	$24.6M [-7.8%]	0.16
Scream (SCREAM)	$11.7M [+102%]	0.05
Spirit Swap (SPIRIT)	$27.9M [-11.6%]	0.12
Tarot (TAROT)	$17.2M [-18%]	0.15
Tomb Finance (TOMB)	$33.7M [-18%]	0.52
Solidly (SOLID)	$6.8M [+36%]
Reaper Farm (OATH)	$12M [-28%]	0.65

FTM Alerts + Lrn.Fi = Blockbytes

The team behind FTM Alerts has revealed significant details regarding their cross-chain evolution, including rebranding to their new name, Blockbytes. The team has partnered with Lrn.Fi to begin building a video-first framework to usher in the next one million crypto users and provide content covering the major L1 and L2 players within web3. 

Fans can still expect Fantom-related content on the new “Across the Chains” show. It will feature cross-chain industry news and events and be live twice a week. The flagship show will cover developments within the Avalanche, Optimism, Polygon, IOTA, NEAR, and METIS ecosystems, with many more on the way. 

The Blockbytes family has plenty more planned, with five new shows outlined in their Twitter thread announcement. 

• Beyond the Block – The newest video podcast with in-depth discussions with industry titans
• Quick Flip – A weekly news and events show focusing on specific L1s and L2s. Everything you need to know in one video.
• Featured by Blockbytes – The fresh spin on AMAs, lifting the hood on the people and protocols that shape our networks
• The Workflow – Crypto education-focused content, providing users with end-to-end training and guidance. 
• Developer’s Corner – Justin Bebis and Doublesharp return to dive deeper into the tech behind the protocols. For your video dosage of developers, swords, and cowboy hats. 

As production begins on the Blockbytes website, all Lrn.Fi content will be gradually transferred to the new domain. Expect the same how-to’s, newsletters, and project overviews but supercharged with video content! Lrn.Fi recently celebrated its 100th published article and is more than ready for the next 100 with its new collaborative partners. 

Fantom Protocol Upgrades

August has been full of significant protocol upgrades within the network. Here are just a few major improvements Fantom users may have missed over the last month.

Beethoven X V2 – UI Overhaul

Beethoven X has orchestrated a complete UI overhaul, and a comprehensive revamp of the sites underlying structure. BEETS fans will find a fresh new front end, improved load times, and a total aesthetics rebuild for both the Fantom and Optimism landing pages. The team has also brought their community updates to the forefront of their new site and highlighted several quality educational resources for users to learn more about what the maestros have to offer. 

Beethoven fans will also be happy to know a new proposal was passed to fund a more developed bug bounty program. If you’d like to learn more about what the Beethoven Philharmonic Orchestra is up to, check out their Concerto Programme covering the new initiatives. 

Liquid Driver V3 – Master Gauges and Shadow Farms

Master Gauges is a brand new Liquidity-as-a-Service product designed and developed by the Liquid Driver team. Inspired by the Curve gauge voting system, the Master Gauges product will allow xLQDR holders to vote on gauges to set $LQDR emissions. This new product hopes to solve the prevalent negative consequences of liquidity mining programs, allowing DEXs to outsource this process to Liquid Driver and drastically reduce capital inefficiencies. This medium post outlines how Liquid Driver, this cross-chain liquidity hub, will work and its innovations. 

The team also released a post discussing the details of “Shadow Farms” in conjunction with the release of SpiritSwap V2. Users can stake their SpiritSwap, SpookySwap, and Beethoven X LPs and farm their respective staked governance tokens. The strategies will harvest the rewards multiple times a day, swap them for their respective yield-bearing versions (xBOO, fBEETS, linSPIRIT), and stake them. For more details, check out Liquid Driver\’s documentation on these unique pools. 

SpiritSwap V2 – New AMMs, UI, and Fee Structure

The SpiritSwap V2 upgrade has been released, allowing users to enjoy the new architectural updates to the AMM infrastructure and updates to some of the smart contracts. The update includes restructured protocol fees and rewarding protocols that list with SpiritSwap a rebate of 25% of the fees their pools generate. The upgrade features a massive overhaul of the protocols fee structure to pass as much value back to inSPIRIT holders and protocols who support SpiritSwap. 

The protocol has updated its bridge aggregator, allowing users to swap tokens while they bridge simultaneously. They’ve also streamlined their bribing process in their new inSPIRIT UI, allowing for simpler snapshots and facilitation of token airdrops. For a comprehensive post outlining all the new upgrades, SpiritSwap users have to look forward to, check out their medium post. 

Fantom Foundation partners with Cypher Capital and GDA Capital

The Fantom Foundation welcomes Cypher Capital and Global Digital Asset (GDA) Capital to the venture capitalist round table.  Both companies have expressed interest in strategic investment and funding, encouraging projects and developers to build applications within the Fantom ecosystem. This follows last month\’s partnership announcement with Mapleblock Capital.

Cypher Capital is a multi-strategy crypto investment platform based in the United Arab Emirates. The firm focuses on partnering with projects in the crypto, blockchain, and digital asset community. The team currently has 45 assets under management and 100+ investments in their portfolio, with partnerships with Polygon, Axie Infinity, Pancake Swap, and many more heavy hitters within the industry. The firm has recently appointed the former Head of Fundraising at Binance Labs, Bill Qian as the new chairman of its board of directors. 

GDA Capital is the capital markets arm of the GDA group of companies. This investment branch of the organization is focused on fintech, blockchain, digital assets, and other ‘disruptive technology businesses and has worked on over 20 digital asset launches. The firm has raised over 300 million in capital for its clients and is heavily involved in Metaverse and NFT ecosystems.

Solidly Evolves – Launches on Ethereum mainnet

Solidly, the previously Fantom native protocol launched by Andre Cronje has announced its V2 and migration to the Ethereum mainnet. The team discussed in an in-depth medium post that their primary motivation for deploying on Ethereum is moving to where “the activity and majority of fees are now” and have stated their intent to expand to other chains once they see the value in doing so. 

Owners of Solidly V1 tokens (including SOLID, veNFT, oxSOLID, SOLIDsex, OXC, and SEX) can visit the burn page here to exchange their tokens for V2 equivalents on Ethereum, to be released at a future date. The burn contract will be open for 30 days, starting from September 1st, 2022, and ending on September 30th, 2022. 

Check out their announcement post for further details on the migration of tokens and the plans for the veNFTs. 

New FTM Governance Proposal: Lowering Validator/Staking Rewards

The Fantom Foundation has put forward a new governance proposal to adjust staking rewards to “closely reflect market-rate and increase emission duration.”  The Foundation seeks to formalize the post-emission structure of the network for the next stage of growth. 

The fees paid to validators have seen an 18x increase between June 2021 (102,928 FTM) and June 2022 (1,834,672 FTM). Currently, the staking reward rate is set at 13.9% (with a 12-month lock), which is above the market rate average compared to other notable networks and L1s. For example: 

• Ethereum – 4.08%
• Solana – 5.36%
• Avalanche – 8.6% 
• BNB – 4.92%

The network has two years of emissions remaining at the current rewards rate. Voters can vote through their fWallet to determine the new rate of rewards. Users can choose between

1. 3% p.a. – Ending in 9.4 years
2. 4% p.a. – Ending in 7 years
3. 5% p.a. – Ending in 5.6 years
4. 6% p.a. – Ending in 4.7 years
5. No change – Ending in 2 years

Current progress sits at 44% of votes cast, with a rate of 67% total participation required for the vote to pass. 

DeFi Snapshot

Chain	Protocols	TVL (USD)	MCap/TVL
Arbitrum	112	$983.9M
Avalanche (AVAX)	249 [+4.2%]	$1.81B [-25.9%]	3.1
BNB Chain (BNB)	451 [+3.9%]	$5.3B [-3.1%]	8.6
Ethereum (ETH)	544 [+3.4%]	$34.6B [-11.2%]	5.55
Fantom (FTM)	258 [+1.9%]	$532M [-20.5%]	1.3
Terra Classic (LUNC)	30 [0%]	$10.25M [-1.6%]
Polygon (MATIC)	297 [+6.5%]	$1.8B [+7.8%]	3.7
Solana (SOL)	78 [+6.8%]	$1.45B [-28.9%]	7.6

Outside the Opera

Outside the Opera has grown so much that the team at Lrn.Fi has decided that it will now be its own standalone newsletter! Be sure to subscribe on the Blockbytes Twitter as the first edition will be coming out next week!

The same quality news will be available for readers looking for an overview of the news within some of the most popular L1 and L2 blockchains. Our eagle-eyed readers will notice a new chain within the DeFi snapshot, so be prepared for the freshest Arbitrum news. If there are any other chains you’d like us to cover, shoot us a message on our Discord.

Key Metrics

Market Cap

Metric – Market Cap (USD)	May 2022	June 2022	July 2022	August 2022
Bottom	$ 751,925,839[13th]	$558,599,166[19th]	$606,862,950[13th]	$686,986,255[29th]
Peak	$ 2,183,045,913[5th]	$1,033,001,240[1st]	$919,526,803[25th]	$1,033,521,662[11th]
Monthly Close	$ 1,057,948,615	$660,373,034	$850,141,151	$699,420,022

Slow and steady improvements are the name of the game for overall market capitalization. FTM was able to briefly pass the one billion dollar mark, a feat not achieved since June 2022. The overall crypto market saw a downturn towards the end of the month, but FTM maintained a higher bottom than the previous two months. 

While writing this article, Fantom sits at number 71 on CoinGecko by market capitalization, dropping down eight places from last month\’s edition. 

Price movement

Metric – FTM (USD)	May 2022	June 2022	July 2022	August 2022
Bottom	$ 0.29 [12th]	$0.22 [19th]	$0.24 [13th]	$0.27 [29th]
Peak	$ 0.86 [5th]	$0.40 [1st]	$0.36 [25th]	$0.41 [11th]
End of Month	$0.40	$0.25	$0.33	$0.27

The Fantom token showed stable growth this month, reaching just above June\’s 2022 high of 40 cents. The price action was overall favorable until dramatic macro conditions caused a dip in the price towards the end of the month.

User Engagement

Metric	May 2022	June 2022	July 2022	August 2022
Avg daily unique wallets created	6,497	3,858	3,094	2,489
Avg daily transaction count	864,685	903,497	880,106	798,734
Total Distinct Addresses (End of Month)	3,172,282	3,288,008	3,386,731	3,467,811

Crypto winter continues to ward against more active use of the Fantom network. August marks the new lowest average daily wallets created since the inception of this newsletter. The average daily transactions for August is the first time the network has facilitated less than 800,000 per day in 2022. This month saw an increase of just over 80,000 new distinct addresses to the network from last month\’s 100,000 increase.

Top FTM Senders and Receivers

SpookySwap and SpiritSwap feature in this month\’s top FTM receivers. The continuing popularity of SpookySwap and the new SpiritSwap protocol upgrades are the likely reasons behind their appearance. The Fantom Special Fee Contract (SFC) continues to collect FTM to distribute to stakers and delegators. 

In a State of the Opera first, we can see that notorious Fantom user ‘Roosh’ has also been sending out plenty of FTM, accounting for 5% of total FTM sent in the final week of August. 

Top Tokens by Transaction Count

Wrapped Fantom, USD Coin, and Power have maintained their positions from last month. Unfortunately, the same can be said for the ‘trash tokens’ NFTWorld and NFTWs that continue to infect the network. For an overview of why these two tokens are suspect, check out my analysis in last month\’s State of the Opera for June 2022.

Top Tokens by Unique Wallets

In another first for State of the Opera, USDC and Wrapped Fantom have been usurped by the latest scam coin to hit the Opera network. 2000 2XBNB has been sent to 115,643 FTM addresses in two weeks. One lucky address is the proud holder of 10 billion of the token. Further snooping on FTMScan showed that the source address spent just USD 13 to spread this coin over the network.

Pulse of the Network

This section will hope to aggregate and compound your interest within the FTM network space. If you’re looking for some research to claim as your own or just the headlines for all the latest news and gossip, this is the Pulse of the Network, the information you don’t want to miss out on.

FTM Ecosystem Headlines

• Gitcoin confirms integration in October 2022 – Launch of 335 million dollar FTM incentive program on track
• Crypto payment gateway, NOWPayments integrates FTM into their Point-of-Sale service – E-commerce companies can now easily integrate FTM payments on their website
• Plena Wallet and Frontier Wallet now offer support for the Fantom Opera chain 
• Chainbase adds Fantom support – Developers can now use cloud-based APIs to quickly build and scale projects 
• The Fantom Blog outlines Fantom’s Transaction Fees and compares them to other L1 solutions
• Cask Protocol is now live on the Fantom network – Cask allows for easy set up of recurring crypto payments or contributions
• Bubblemaps, an innovative visualization platform for blockchain data, now integrated with FTM
• Nansen Portfolio now allows for tracking your Fantom holdings in one convenient location

Keep your eye on

• Reaper Farm reveals new single-sided sFTMX crypt featuring Granary Finance
• Zest Protocol introduces a synthetic version of Ethereum (ETHz) to the Fantom network – For more details check out this Coinwire article
• WigoSwap launches WigoMarket – The latest web3 marketplace for NFTs on the Fantom blockchain
• DEUS Finance redeploys $DEI with a 99/1 mint/redeem gap – The protocol has also introduced a new look to their app to pair with the announcement 
• Beethoven X releases July 2022 monthly performance report
• Liquid Driver dives deep into their Summer-Wrap up – The team discusses the ups and downs over the last couple of months
• Nick Drakon has released “Revelo Intel”, a free daily newsletter full of valuable information for crypto enthusiasts
• Tomb V3 beta released – Check out the latest Tomb Tuesday for all the building the Tomb Finance team is working on
• Retreeb teases a new listing with ‘a major tier 1 exchange’ – Who could it be and what does this mean for TREEB
• ScarySwap launches on Fantom – The “first ever zero swapping fees DEX on the Fantom chain”

FTM Podcasts and Videos

• Fantom Unchained Episode 49: The team has their last episode of Fantom Unchained….for now
• Vertical Blocks Episode 1: Fantom’s Head of Marketing, Juan Angel sits down with Fantom CEO Michael Kong and Director of Business Development Sam Harcourt in the inaugural episode of their new podcast
• Vertical Blocks Episode 2: Juan talks with Chief Research Officer Professor Bernhard Scholz to discuss his background, the research team’s ongoing research + commitment to security, and the future of the FVM
• JPGs against Humanity Teaser Trailer: Get hype for this Fantom NFT documentary that takes a look at the history behind Tombheads Auction House
• Nick Drakon talks with the Head of Business Development at Binance BNB Chain on the State of DeFi
• Felix Exchange reveals their Youtube Channel – The first video is an AMA with the team from Paintswap discussing NFTs, contracts, and some more V3 updates

Industry Reports

• DappRader releases Blockchain Industry Report for July 2022 – The team goes into how the Terra collapse continues to have ripple effects in the DeFi world
• Glassnode and CoinMarketCap Research team up to deliver this report on the “Challenging Bear Market” and what this means for the future of the ecosystem
• NFTS: More Than Just A Fad – A brief overview of the Intellectual property issues surrounding NFTs
• Ethereum futures funding rates decline as traders turn bearish – Find out whether traders are funding shorts or longs on the Ethereum merge news in this Messari Report
• Critiquing the SEC’s On-Going Efforts to Regulate Crypto Exchanges – Scholars from the University of Arkansas discuss the latest SEC efforts to regulate exchanges

FTM Education Community and Art

• Get in on this FantoMemes page now 
• @_kikyums creates an awesome FTM Alerts Poster
• @viktoria_defi has rolled up an informative thread on SpookySwap
• @ftm_ecologist has sorted out some of the major FTM ecosystem updates in their thread
• Chief Frog Officer FantomIntern covers the three main varieties in DEXes within the Fantom Ecosystem
• DeFi Naly explores the Liquid Driver V3 update in an amazing thread 
• A dedicated Uman has gotten an awesome tattoo