Welcome to the latest installment of State of the Opera! Your one-stop shop for everything Fantom. In this edition, we’ll discuss Fantom network upgrades, fBEETs X Reliquary, Revest Finance’s latest product, and shopping with your FTM tokens.
The team at Blockbytes is working hard on a fresh new website for all our educational content so stay tuned. 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 Blockbytes, 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) | $49.6M [-14.5%] | 0.09 |
| Spooky Swap (BOO) | $105.9M [-13.2%] | 0.14 |
| Geist Finance (GEIST) | $33.7M [-15.7%] | 0.02 |
| Liquid Driver (LQDR) | $15.2M [-38%] | 0.18 |
| Scream (SCREAM) | $11.7M [+1%] | 0.03 |
| Spirit Swap (SPIRIT) | $17.2M [-38.4%] | 0.12 |
| Tarot (TAROT) | $13.7M [-20%] | 0.12 |
| Tomb Finance (TOMB) | $15.2M [-55%] | |
| Solidly (SOLID) | $3.5M [-48.5%] | |
| Reaper Farm (OATH) | $9.4M [-22%] | 0.7 |
Fantom Releases PebbleDB Upgrade
The Fantom Foundation has revealed the release information for PebbleDB. This new upgrade is an alternative to the default LevelDB currently used by the Opera client for persistent storage of events, transactions, and world state data.
Recent performance studies & testing of the research team suggest that PebbleDB database-driven nodes handle input/output reads with far greater throughput efficiency than LevelDB. The bandwidth usage could be reduced by 90%. PebbleDB has been designed to operate on modern, fast, persistent storage drives, namely SSD and NVMe drives. Full details of the big upgrade can be found in the technical documentation provided by the Fantom Foundation.
fBEETS X Reliquary – The new Chef in Town
Beethoven X has released a Medium post discussing their plans to utilize the ByteMasons Reliquary technology. In another Medium post, the team discussed how the community vote in favor of introducing a locking mechanism for fBEETs spurred extensive research into the most effective strategy for implementing the proposal.
The conductors of Beethoven X explained that financial NFTs (fNFTs) were an example of a promising technology that had yet to realize its full potential in secondary markets. More often than not, users holding these positions are more inclined to sell fNFTs under market price to ensure a buyer. Working with the ByteMasons, the team found an alternative solution in The Reliquary.
The Reliquary is an innovative primitive that offers an alternative solution to the shortcomings of the current vote escrowed model.
Through the use of financial NFTS, the reliquary offers users the freedom and flexibility to build sustainable positions over time that align users’ incentives with the desired outcomes of the protocol in a more ethical manner. Full details on The Reliquary and the Beethoven X integration can be found in the above Medium posts.
Resonate across multiple networks
Revest Finance’s latest creation, Resonate, will be deployed on the Fantom Opera network. The new protocol will go live on Ethereum, Optimism, Arbitrum, Fantom, and Polygon networks. Blockbytes sat down with Rob from Revest Finance to discuss their latest release in the inaugural episode of ‘Featured by Blockbytes’.
Resonate is a yield futures protocol built on top of Revest’s fNFT technology. The project will be able to separate the principal and interest components of a position by issuing two separate fNFTs; one containing the principal and the other containing the rights to future interest on the principal investment. Resonate facilitates the commerce of the rights to future interest by matching issuers (who want to sell their interest rights for a one-time upfront payment), and purchasers (who want to buy the rights to future interest for a one-time upfront payment).
$SHOP with your FTM
Shopping.io has launched its new native token $SHOP. The e-commerce company has partnered with Fantom (and 49 other projects) to allow holders to purchase goods from some of the world’s largest retailers using network native tokens, including FTM, and receive 20% of their purchase in $SHOP. Users can shop from major web retailers such as Amazon, Ebay, Walmart, and The Home Depot.
DeFi Snapshot
| Chain | Protocols | TVL (USD) | MCap/TVL |
| Arbitrum | 123 [+9.8%] | $997.9M [+1.4%] | |
| Avalanche (AVAX) | 261 [+4.8%] | $1.59B [-12.1%] | 3.22 |
| BNB Chain (BNB) | 475 [+5.3%] | $5.5B [+3.8%] | 8.7 |
| Ethereum (ETH) | 570 [+4.8%] | $31.9B [-7.8%] | 5.1 |
| Fantom (FTM) | 266 [+3.1%] | $466M [-12.4%] | 1.2 |
| Terra Classic (LUNC) | 30 [0%] | $8.6M [-16%] | |
| Polygon (MATIC) | 317 [+6.7%] | $1.36B [-24.4%] | 4.5 |
| Solana (SOL) | 81 [+3.8%] | $1.34B [-7.6%] | 9 |
Key Metrics
Market Cap
| Metric – Market Cap (USD) | June 2022 | July 2022 | August 2022 | September 2022 |
| Bottom | $558,599,166[19th] | $606,862,950[13th] | $686,986,255[29th] | $571,033,712[19th] |
| Peak | $1,033,001,240[1st] | $919,526,803[25th] | $1,033,521,662[11th] | $700,511,879[11th] |
| Monthly Close | $660,373,034 | $850,141,151 | $699,420,022 | $578,616,689 |
Fantom’s market capitalization peaked past the 700,000 mark earlier in the month, following the lead of trend-setting assets such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. The tail end of the month would see the market cap stabilize between $560M to just under $600M.
While writing this article, Fantom sits at number 73 on CoinGecko by market capitalization dropping down two places from last month’s edition.
Price movement
| Metric – FTM (USD) | June 2022 | July 2022 | August 2022 | September 2022 |
| Bottom | $0.22 [19th] | $0.24 [13th] | $0.27 [29th] | $0.221 [22nd] |
| Peak | $0.40 [1st] | $0.36 [25th] | $0.41 [11th] | $0.275 [11th] |
| End of Month | $0.25 | $0.33 | $0.27 | $0.227 |
The decision has been made to add another decimal digit to help reflect the slow decline in price for the native token. The spread between the highest point and the lowest point in the month was relatively small with the token failing to breach much higher than last month’s lowest price.
User Engagement
| Metric | June 2022 | July 2022 | August 2022 | September 2022 |
| Avg daily unique wallets created | 3,858 | 3,094 | 2,489 | 1,620 |
| Avg daily transaction count | 903,497 | 880,106 | 798,734 | 728,457 |
| Total Distinct Addresses (End of Month) | 3,288,008 | 3,386,731 | 3,467,811 | 3,518,338 |
User engagement has seen another month of considerable decline as crypto winter continues to dull interest. The average daily unique wallets created have gone down by 800 since last month. Transactions have declined and total distinct addresses have only just passed the 3.5M mark towards the end of the month.
Pulse of the Network
This section will hope to aggregate and compound on your own 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
- Four new validators joined the Fantom network, bringing the total number to 75 active validator nodes
- The total number of FTM burned has crossed the eight million mark
- Prime Protocol, currently on test net, will allow for cross-chain borrowing to unlock the full potential of your DeFi positions in one place
- Cross Chain bridge, ChainPort now supports Fantom tokens
- Fantom now available on Arctic Wallet
- Non-custodial crypto exchange SimpleSwap now supports FTM swaps without sign-up
- Bridge and DEX aggregator Swidge launches on Fantom
- Celebrate one year of the Fantom Foundation’s Ecosystem Spotlight by checking out the very first entry
- Etherspot, an SDK offering a non-custodial smart wallet framework now on Fantom
Keep your eye on
- Fantom Domains has completed auctions for 3,4,5, and 6-character FNS domain names – Users can find these items listed on Paintswap
- Beethoven X has detailed a comprehensive new list of bounties on Immunefi – White Hat hackers will be rewarded based on the impact of the vulnerabilities discovered
- Reaper Farm has added Liquid Driver V3 Shadow Farm vaults
- Shipping Season has begun – Liquid Driver discuss their new UI and boosted Shadow Farms in their post about V3
- PaintSwap continues its spree of updates – Check out the updated roadmap for what the marketplace has in store for the future
- The winner of Tarot’s Video contest has been announced – Educator extraordinaire Subli has walked away with first prize and 12,500 TAROT
FTM Podcasts and Videos
- Across the Chains Episode 3 – The team is back to discuss Beethoven X Boosted pools on Optimism, the LFVM at Smartcon 2022, and the fallout from the Voyager bankruptcy
- Vertical Blocks: Episode 4 feat 0xngmi of DefiLlama – Join Juan and Simone as they speak with the mysterious 0xngmi, one of the many anonymous operators behind DefiLlama
- How Fantom is Pushing the DeFi Frontier – Chainlink hosts a discussion detailing the demand for innovation from DeFi users (Requires an email to view)
- Revest Finance, Velodrome, and the ByteMasons answer community questions
Industry Reports
- Nansen releases Fantom Quarterly Report – Q2 2022 – Find out how Fantom did last quarter with this 10-minute report
- A16z crypto has released a comprehensive guide to Zero Knowledge technology
FTM Education Community and Art
- The Fantom Ecologist discusses his top five earning strategies on the Opera network
- Fantom Intern explains why users would want lower validator/staking rewards
- Nick.ftm shares why he thinks why Fantom is the best place for GameFi to thrive
- Subli goes above and beyond to help Optimism users complete quests and earn $OP
