Fantom 2021 Year In Review Report: A vigorous transformation

Fantom has existed in the crypto market for a long time. However, it is undeniable that 2021 marks the biggest milestone of Fantom.

In general, 2021 has been the year for blockchain platforms to shine. Among them, Fantom stands out as one of the best performers. Hence, it would be wasted to not look back at what has happened on Fantom.

Understanding the situation, this report has been carefully conducted by the Coin98 Insights Team, with the intention of providing the best information and insights to readers.

You can refer to the following article to get an overview of the Fantom system before we dive into the analysis of the development journey of the whole system in 2021: The Fantom Ecosystem Overview

The report is a collection of significant events, milestones, and statistics.

The Coin98 team believes that this report will be a valuable resource for your crypto investment adventure in 2022.

Note: You can download the 2021 Fantom Report (pdf file) at: c98.link/Fantomians-Fantom2021Reportv1

Looking back at Fantom on 2021

How it began

In this part, let’s take a look at how Fantom started in 2021. Here we look at 2 main parts:

• Ecosystem Overview.
• Key Statistics.

1. Ecosystem Overview

First of all, when it comes to a DeFi ecosystem, we need to pay attention to its native token.

It can be clearly seen that, at the beginning of 2021, the Market Cap of FTM was extremely small ($0.04B). Investing in FTM at that time was highly risky, which explains why after 1 year, FTM has become one of the top tokens in terms of ROI (Return On Investment).

In the first half of 2021, the DeFi ecosystem on Fantom was still immature. The number of native protocols inside the ecosystem was unsubstantial, while the most active projects on Fantom at that time were Multichain ones.

It was not until May 2021 that a few native projects started to appear. Some of them were SpiritSwap, SpookySwap,... which were all supported directly by Fantom Foundation. That support acts as a catalyst for those projects to continue building and developing their products, regardless of the market sentiment.

In the end, those projects became the main contributors to the drastic growth of the Fantom ecosystem.

2. Key Statistics

• FTM price: $0.016.
• FTM Trading Volume (24h): $5.4M.
• Total Daily Transactions: 3148.
• Number of unique addresses: 5040.

How it is growing

To follow how Fantom has changed over 1 year, let’s go into 2 main sectors again:

• Ecosystem Overview.
• Key Statistics.

1. Ecosystem Overview

After a year, FTM became one of the best performers in the crypto market.

By the end of 2021, the Market Cap of FTM reached $5.7B, 142x as high as that a year ago.

Underneath the rapid growth of the price of FTM lies a massive DeFi ecosystem that has been growing constantly, which has strongly contributed to the development of Fantom.

In early 2021, the majority of projects on Fantom actually came from other blockchain platforms. Nevertheless, before moving on to 2022, a wide range of native protocols have appeared on Fantom, fulfilling every DeFi Stack inside the ecosystem.

• AMM: SpookySwap, SpiritSwap, Beethoven X,...
• Lending: Geist Finance, Scream,...
• Yield Aggregator: Reaper Farm, Grim Finance (the project was exploited recently), RoboVault,...
• Besides, there are numerous projects in different sectors that have grown rapidly: Tomb Finance, Tarot, Hector DAO,...

2. Key Statistics

• FTM price: $2.31 (x142).
• FTM Trading Volume (24h): $569M (x100).
• Total Daily Transactions: 607K (x200).
• Number of unique addresses: 1.5M (x300).
• TVL (Total Value Locked): $5.7B.

Fantom's Key Milestones in 2021

Q1 2021

In Q1 2021, DeFi on Fantom was not prominent. Instead of directly getting into developing DeFi, Fantom Foundation focused on partnering and integrating with Infrastructure protocols like Chainlink, Band Protocol, API3,... or CEXs like Binance, OKEx,... It can be clearly seen that this is careful preparation for the later growth of DeFi on Fantom.

At the same time, Fantom also showed its next move: Apart from expanding DeFi, Fantom wanted to develop a blockchain solution for different businesses and countries.

Fantom started partnering with multiple projects from different fields like Coti (Payment), Suterusu (Privacy), V-ID (Identity), Travala (Travel),... and with various countries like Ukraine, Pakistan, Afghanistan,...

⇒ Via these actions, Fantom successfully built the base for its growth in 2021.

Q2 2021

Going into Q2 2021, after completing its Infrastructure elements, Fantom began to develop DeFi. Initially, Multichain protocols had the tendency to migrate to Fantom: SushiSwap, Curve, Cream,...

Afterwards, native projects that are directly supported by Fantom Foundation started appearing inside the ecosystem, some of which can be seen as SpookySwap, SpiritSwap, Grim Finance, Scream, Tomb Finance,...

When the ecosystem was immature, Fantom’s approach was to attract the migration of Multichain projects. As a result, most of the TVL within the ecosystem flowed into them.

Even though this approach helped Fantom make its first steps, it was not really healthy for the ecosystem as its native protocols were eclipsed by those Multichain ones and couldn’t take advantage of the cash flow.

However, in May 2021, when Fantom’s native protocols showed signs of going up, the market sentiment didn’t flavor them as all crypto assets turned red. Projects on Fantom were affected and lost their momentum.

⇒ In Q2, Fantom made its first steps into DeFi, but there was nothing unique happening. Nevertheless, thanks to that, Fantom started realizing its weaknesses, which allowed us to witness their next approaches to those problems and the solutions they addressed.

Q3 2021

When the market becomes quiet, one of the most effective ways to evaluate the growth of an ecosystem lies directly in the projects within that ecosystem.

In a bull market, projects can effortlessly release products and make profits by simply forking others. But on the contrary, in a bear market, how many projects would stay and keep building with the intention of releasing actual products for users?

In fact, on Fantom, the number of dedicated projects was not really significant, whereas a massive number of “scam” and “rug pull” projects existed, which left a bad impression on the ecosystem.

On the other hand, native projects that are supported by Fantom Foundation still played an important role in the ecosystem. Fortunately, at that time, they still resiliently developed their products and made them better day by day.

If anyone followed the ecosystem in Q3 2021 closely, it can be easily noticed that all Fantom native tokens like BOO, SPIRIT,... had their prices divided from 5 to 10 times. Even the price of the FTM token was divided 3 times.

After that event, investors slowly lost interest in Fantom, and the majority of the cash flow was withdrawn out of the ecosystem. Regardless of the situation, both on-chain and off-chain statistics on Fantom improved, slowly but steadily.

Products were still developed, statistics continued to show good signs, but tokens were being dumped relentlessly. For Fantom’s true believers, this was a promising investment opportunity.

However, for a DeFi ecosystem like Fantom to grow consistently, it needs a catalyst. Then what was the catalyst for Fantom?

At the end of August, Fantom Foundation announced an incentive program consisting of 370M FTM. At that time, the price of FTM was around $1, which means that the incentive program was worth approximately $370M.

With this incentive program, Fantom was able to not only push the growth of existing native protocols, but also attract more developers and protocols to the ecosystem. There is no doubt that this is the biggest step Fantom has made in 2021 to help it gain more cash flow and grow more dramatically.

⇒ In Q3, even though the market didn’t support Fantom in terms of token prices, it was still able to develop the core products in order to prepare for a more enormous explosion later on. More actions and signals towards the growth of Fantom started appearing, especially the DeFi incentive program.

Q4 2021

Q4 2021 was the time when Fantom took the spotlight. When everything was ready, from the completion of DeFi legos to the participation of the cash flow, every statistic on Fantom started breaking ATH (All-Time High) and reached new records.

After a long time of building, Fantom native protocols became more prepared than ever. Being different from Q2 when the main factor to draw the cash flow to Fantom was Multichain products, this time, native projects like SpookySwap, Geist Finance,... took the lead of the ecosystem.

Besides, Fantom Foundation even held a conference for various KOLs and developers: Fantom Developer Conference.

This event took place with the aim to gather different crypto influencers, especially those who have an impact on Fantom, in order to discuss Fantom’s future plans and development schemes.

From this conference, numerous news and “alpha leaks” have been revealed, one of which was the upcoming release of Felix - a CEX made individually for Fantom.

Nevertheless, for a token to grow healthily in price, there always exists corrections; and Fantom has witnessed one of those.

After the FTM price breaking ATH numerous times with the highest being $3.44, it has been corrected to the lowest of $1.14 (nearly divided 3 times). Other native tokens inside the ecosystem were also divided from 5 to 10 times, which looked similar to the situation in May 2021.

Nonetheless, this situation completely changed right before 2021 ended, when the FTM price bounced 80% in just 5 days. A lot of signs have indicated that Fantom would continue its bull wave rather than stopping, and that is in fact happening.

⇒ Q4 was the time for Fantom to make the biggest difference and set a new remarkable milestone for the whole ecosystem. Although the price of FTM declined heavily after a drastic growth, it was a healthy correction after all. Data are still indicating a continuing wave for Fantom.

2022 Predictions for Fantom Ecosystem

2021 marked the tremendous growth of Fantom. At the beginning of 2021, DeFi on Fantom was still undeveloped and it was not clear which path Fantom was taking. Up to this moment, the situation has been completely changed:

• The AMM sector is now fully developed with SpookySwap and SpiritSwap leading.
• The Lending sector is led by Geist Finance and Scream.
• The Yield Aggregator sector provides the main yields on Fantom, led by Reaper Farm.
• FantomStarter is dominating the Launchpad sector.
• The ecosystem continues to attract more investors and cash flow with protocols like Tomb Finance, Tarot, Robo Vault, Hector DAO,...
• And many more native and multichain protocols that are constantly developing and growing the ecosystem.

So, what can we expect from Fantom in 2022? Here are some of my predictions:

GameFi to be developed better

NFT is creating a huge market trend, but Fantom has mostly adopted NFT Collectibles with over 50 projects, while GameFi has not existed. While other blockchain platforms realized this opportunity and have developed GameFi dramatically, Fantom is still paying little attention.

This sector is still amazingly potential, and Fantom can take this chance to grow its ecosystem even more.

DeFi 2.0 to grow more tremendously on Fantom

If you have read about DeFi 2.0, you will understand that DeFi 2.0 is changing the way the crypto market works, especially with capital efficiency.

We can expect more games and ways to earn on Fantom with projects like Tomb Finance, Robo Vault,... continuing to become more prominent as well as fresh, innovative projects appearing.

Andre Cronje x Daniele Sesta?

Andre Cronje has been the inspiration for the whole Fantom ecosystem, while Daniele is one of the best developers in DeFi that led the wave of DeFi 2.0 with Abracadabra (SPELL), Wonderland (TIME) and Popsicle Finance (ICE). When these guys collaborate, it’s gonna be huge. And that is happening.

Conclusion

We have come to the end of this Fantom 2021 Report, made by the Coin98 Insights Team. I hope that you enjoy this report and gain deeper knowledge about Fantom and its DeFi ecosystem, as well as its development process in 2021.

For full report with detailed infographics and other insights, you can download the PDF right here: c98.link/Fantomians-Fantom2021Reportv1