How To Stake Fantom

What Is Fantom? A Guide to Fantom's Ecosystem

Geist Finance is a lending and borrowing market on Fantom based on one of the largest DeFi protocols: AAVE.

As GEIST has no governance or ownership, there is also no protocol treasury. Instead, 50% of the revenue generated through borrowing is distributed directly to users who stake GEIST. Both lenders and borrowers receive GEIST rewards to incentivize protocol use.

GEIST liquidity mining employs a mechanism first introduced by Ellipsis Finance on BSC. Rewards are vested for 3 months, but may be claimed immediately for a 50% penalty. The penalty is then distributed to users who choose to lock GEIST for 3 months. This mechanism ensures steady rewards for those who actively commit to the protocol by locking their tokens.

GEIST stakers receive protocol fees, GEIST lockers receive protocol fees as well as exit penalties from users who exit their vests early.

Geist Finance

HyperPay

Fantom

Retreeb

SpiritSwap

Timechain Swap Token

Wrapped Fantom

Speedy

FRAKT Token

Magic Internet Money

Splinterlands is a digital, collectible card game based on blockchain technology and inspired by games like Magic the Gathering and Hearthstone, where players build a collection of cards with different attributes and battle other players in skills-based matches. It is a game where players can buy, sell and trade their digital assets just as they would with physical trading cards games such as Magic the Gathering, Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh!

Splinterlands was created as players lost the ability to truly own their assets (or trading cards) once games went digital. With blockchain technology, it allows players to own and trade their digital assets freely once again. It also allows the game to have true scarcity and transparency, which means all cards on Splinterlands have a verifiable supply and historical record.

Players battle other players by choosing ranked or practice battles. With ranked battles, players can increase their rating. There is no downside to playing ranked battles as a beginner since players with a rating below 100 do not lose ranking points. Battles take place between players of similar strength. When matched up with an opponent, both players choose a set of six monster cards and one summoner card for the battle to destroy all their opponent’s monster cards and win the battle.

Although the game is free-to-play, players need to purchase the summoner’s spellbook for $10 if they want to unlock the game in full. With the summoner’s spellbook, players get access to their account keys and unlock the ability to earn Dark Energy Crystals, which can be redeemed for real currency.

Splinterlands started in May 2018 and launched Splintershards (SPS) – its governance token for the SPS decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) at the end of July 2021. It concluded a $3.6M private token sale for 6.6% of the SPS token supply. After reaching 100,000 players in its first three years, it added another 50,000 in just over a month from June 2021. Splinterland plans to build out its game in the latter half of 2021, with oracle integration planned for Q1 2022.

Splintershards

Anchor Protocol is a lending and borrowing protocol offering up to 19.5% yield on stablecoin deposits. Lenders can deposit their UST and earn attractive rates on their investments while simultaneously benefiting from low volatility. Borrowers can turn their LUNA collateral into productive assets without giving up control of it.

Anchor Protocol can thus attract risk-averse investors looking for high-yield, low-volatility investments and increase demand for UST. This advances the adoption of UST as a stablecoin and subsequently the adoption of the Terra project in DeFi. With the increasing adoption of Terra, whose founders are behind the launch of Anchor Protocol, the price of LUNA will increase.

Anchor Protocol

MIR is the governance token of Mirror Protocol, a synthetic assets protocol built by Terraform Labs (TFL) on the Terra blockchain.

Mirror Protocol is decentralized from day 1, with the on-chain treasury and code changes governed by holders of the MIR token. TFL has no intention of keeping or selling MIR tokens, and there are no admin keys or special access privileges granted. The intent for this is to be a completely decentralized, community-driven project.

Mirrored assets are blockchain tokens that behave like "mirror" versions of real-world assets by reflecting the exchange prices on-chain. They give traders the price exposure to real assets while enabling fractional ownership, open access and censorship resistance as any other cryptocurrency. Unlike traditional tokens which serve to represent a real, underlying asset, mAssets are purely synthetic and only capture the price movement of the corresponding asset.

Mirrored assets provide the following advantages:

Global Accessibility: In most markets outside of Europe & North America, access to foreign equities and forex markets is highly limited. Crypto allows global accessibility without entry barriers.

Fractional Orders: In traditional finance, to execute a fractional order, multiple fractional orders are bundled together to execute a unitary transaction. The process of gathering all the orders into one requires additional waiting time. By utilizing the blockchain, orders volume is simply represented as a number on the blockchain, so there is no need for the intermediary bundling process.

Nearly-Instantaneous Order Execution: Oftentimes due to the lack of liquidity (price-time-priority order book algorithm), orders can take up to a day to fully execute. Given the fact that Mirror relies on liquidity provided by each individual asset pool, orders can be executed as fast as the blocktime of the network (~ 6 seconds).

Mirror Protocol

BENQI is a decentralized non-custodial liquidity market as well as a liquid staking protocol built on the high-speed Avalanche smart contract network. The lending protocol allows users to lend, borrow, or earn interest using their digital assets.  The Liquid Staking protocol provides a solution for capital efficiency, offering users the opportunity to unlock their “staked” AVAX to be used on Decentralized Financial protocols

The founding team chose Avalanche because of its decentralized network’s claimed high scalability, low fees and compatibility with popular plugin wallets.

BENQI was founded in 2021 with $6 million in backing. Among its strategic investors are Ascensive Assets, Dragonfly Capital, Mechanism Capital, Arrington XRP Capital, Spartan Group, TRGC, Woodstock Fund, Ava Labs, Morningstar Ventures, GBV Capital, Skynet Trading Ltd, Rarestone Capital, Genblock Capital, Moon Inc.

Who Are the Founders of BENQI?

Rome Blockchain Labs Inc. is responsible for the development of BENQI. It is an incubator and a software development firm specializing in decentralized finance (DeFi). JD Gagnon is one of the co-founders and CEO of Rome Blockchain Labs. The two other co-founders are Hannu Kuusi and Alexander Shul.

JD Gagnon graduated with a bachelor’s degree in commerce in finance and accounting from the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. Before Rome Blockchain Labs, Gagnon has created the Velox algorithmic trading platform. Gagnon is also the founder and CEO of Scotch & Ramen Media, Inc. and CSO of Etheralabs, Inc.

Hannu Kuusi has experience building institutional-grade infrastructure for financial technology (fintech) and military applications.

Alexander Szul is in charge of managing the development of the BENQI liquidity market platform.

What Makes BENQI (QI) Unique?

BENQI (QI) claims to be the first DeFi Lending project on the Avalanche platform. It offers DeFi users from congested and centralized networks the option to move and place their unused assets on BENQI with no hurdles and low network fees. Avalanche allows BENQI users to seamlessly and affordably access decentralized financial services and increase control over their strategies.

Developers have the option to use BENQI to create financial products using the protocol and governance tokens.

BENQI also aims to ease the overloading of the Ethereum network by providing Ethereum users with a less expensive and faster alternative. BENQI members can withdraw liquidity from the shared liquidity market, borrow from the liquidity market and get a clear view of interest rates.

BENQI

Acala Token

Secret (SCRT) is a privacy-oriented blockchain built on Cosmos. Its smart contracts are called Secret Contracts and allow DApps to use private data on Secret, similar to how smart contracts operate on other blockchains. However, Secret Contracts transfer encrypted inputs into encrypted outputs without exposing data. This is made possible thanks to the encrypted contract states during the execution.

Data privacy is guaranteed by combining encryption protocols and key management within a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). This allows Secret Contracts to compete for several privacy-related use cases that traditional blockchains have found difficult to accommodate. For instance, private voting mechanisms or credit scoring applications become possible since they do not expose sensitive user data on-chain with Secret.

Secret

Boba Network

Aurory is a next-generation studio building a universe of interoperable web3 games. Two original IP’s were born from this universe, which are actively shaping the future of the Aurory player experience.

The first of these two IP’s are Aurorians. A collection of 10,000 anime style NFT characters that double as both a PFP, as well as a playable avatar with various in-game perks.

The second are Nefties. These magical creatures have been designed as non-fungible tokens NFTs with a unique set of stats that influence their performance in-game. They serve as companions on each player’s journey, and can be hatched, traded, collected, and used in battles.

Aurory currently hosts two playable games (both in alpha) which continue to evolve in a live-ops development format:

Seekers of Tokane: A JRPG, where players embark on a dangerous rogue-like adventure through the world of Tokane, collecting and battling fierce Nefties in epic turn-based combat.

Aurory Tactics: A PvP timeline-based battling game where players must learn how to best use their Neftie creature's abilities, competing against opponents to rise to the top of the leaderboard for rewards and glory.

The project proudly boasts one of the most experienced executive and development suites in blockchain gaming, with dozens of talents from established gaming studios, such as Ubisoft, Electronic Arts, Rovio, Warner Bros, and more.

Aurory

Efinity is a cross-chain NFT platform developed by Enjin and built on Polkadot. Efinity was created as the next generation blockchain for digital assets with the aim of adapting to the challenges of the world of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), according to the project.

The main specialization of the Efinity project is the NFT space. With the protocol, traders and gamers can create, distribute, transfer, sell and buy NFTs. Efinity aims to remove barriers to entry into the NFT space/decentralized gaming, and to simplify user experience and digital asset governance.

Efinity Token powers the entire Efinity ecosystem, EFI aims to prioritize the generation, transfer and purchase of tokens using an inter-chain infrastructure of protocols resulting in lower transaction fees. As for incentives, rewards on PoW blockchains with NFT functionality go to miners who create/trade tokens, thereby forming a community.

One of the long-term goals of Efinity is to become a hub for both fungible and non-fungible tokens, accepting tokens from any other chain, facilitating the pricing and exchange of NFTs, increasing transaction volume, and creating network effects.

In December 2021, the project won the Polkadot parachain auction, and in March 2022, Enjin launched their flagship parachain Efinity on the Polkadot Relay Chain — a blockchain platform that provides a decentralized parachain network where people havecontrol over their data and identity.

Efinity Token

JOE (JOE) is the native token of Trader Joe, a decentralized exchange (DEX) on the Avalanche (AVAX) blockchain that offers DeFi services, including swapping, staking and yield farming. The exchange has been growing rapidly, attracting over $4 billion in total value locked (TVL) since it was launched in June 2021. Trader Joe claims to take a community-first approach, and to prioritize innovation, speed and safety. It aims to provide a one-stop-shop DeFi experience and to integrate new products without compromising on security. To achieve this, Trader Joe has outlined an ambitious roadmap that focuses on token-holder growth. It plans to have improved staking, non-fungible-token (NFT) exchange listings, the collateralization of the JOE token, and leveraged trading –– all during 2021.

Spell Token (SPELL) is a reward token associated with abracadabra.money, a lending platform that uses interest-bearing tokens (ibTKNs) as collateral to borrow a USD-pegged stablecoin called Magic Internet Money (MIM). Abracadabra uses the Kashi Lending Technology pioneered by SushiSwap (SUSHI) to provide isolated lending markets that allow users to adjust their risk tolerance according to the collateral they decide to use. Users can deposit collateral and borrow MIM against it. Abracadabra also offers yield farming opportunities, where users can stake their liquidity provider (LP) tokens to farm SPELL. This facilitates better liquidity for certain cryptocurrency pairs, currently Ether (ETH)-Spell Token (SPELL) and Magic Internet Money (MIM)-LP 3pool Curve (3CRV). Furthermore, users can also open leveraged farming positions using borrowed MIM from their interest-bearing collateral.

Spell Token

Moonriver is an Ethereum-compatible, smart-contract parachain on Kusama. It is intended to be a companion network to Moonbeam, where it will provide a permanently incentivized canary network. New code will ship to Moonriver first, where it can be tested and verified under real economic conditions. Once proven, the same code will ship to Moonbeam on Polkadot.

It does this by providing a full EVM implementation, a Web3-compatible API, and bridges that connect Moonriver to existing Ethereum networks.

This allows developers to deploy existing Solidity smart contracts and DApp frontends to Moonriver with minimal changes.

Moonriver

Symmetric

Karura is an all-in-one decentralized finance (DeFi) hub and stablecoin platform built on Kusama (KSM) and integrated into Polkadot (DOT). Karura was created by the Acala Network, which has won four Web3 Foundation grants and founded the Substrate Developer Academy.

To learn more about this project, check out our deep dive of Karura.

Both Karura and Acala are backed by multiple funds, including Coinbase Ventures, Pantera Capital, Polychain Capital and Hypersphere. Karura and Acala operate in parallel. Specifically, Karura is implementing DeFi on Kusama in the same way that Acala is offering DeFi on Polkadot. The network is built with almost the same codebase as Acala: the two platforms provide scalable, convenient and fast DeFi cross-chain ecosystems for Kusama and Polkadot.

Parachain Karura is a platform that allows users to create effective, low-cost and complex financial applications, saving time and increasing trading efficiency.

The platform itself provides a multi-collateralized stablecoin backed by cross-chain assets (kUSD), a trustless staking derivative (liquid KSM), and an automated market maker (AMM) decentralized exchange (DEX) for unlocking liquidity and supporting financial innovation.

Karura is the decentralized financial hub of Kusama, a scalable multi-chain network for radical innovation and early-stage Polkadot deployments. Karura is the sister network to Acala. It hosts multichain liquid staking token (LST) protocols (such as liquid KSM - LKSM), an AMM decentralized exchange, and an app platform that is EVM-compatible and highly customizable (based on Substrate). Karura is secured by Kusama, and is the liquidity gateway of Kusama parachains, Acala and L1/L2 blockchains

Karura

What Is Velas (VLX)?
Velas is a pioneering solana L1 Fork with Full EVM blockchain bridging the gap between EVM familiarity and unparalleled performance.

Velas is an highly unique dual-chain architecture, seamlessly merging the best of both worlds: the robust security and established developer ecosystem of the EVM with the lightning-fast transaction processing capabilities of Solana. This hybrid approach unlocks a treasure trove of possibilities for Ethereum projects seeking to escape congestion and scale to new heights.

The defining feature of Velas lies in its full EVM compatibility. Existing Ethereum smart contracts can be migrated seamlessly with a single click, eliminating the need for costly code rewrites and preserving the valuable expertise invested in the EVM ecosystem. This one-click migration paves the way for a smooth transition, allowing developers to leverage their existing skills and tools on a platform built for speed and scalability.

It leverages the power of Solana’s parallel transaction processing to deliver lightning-fast speeds exceeding 75,000 TPS. This translates to near-instantaneous transaction finality and minimal fees, a stark contrast to the congested and expensive environment of Ethereum. For dApps and users, this translates to a smoother, more efficient experience.

But speed is just the beginning. Velas is also:

Decentralized: No central authority controls the network. Power is in the hands of the community through a secure Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism.

Carbon-neutral: Velas is committed to sustainability, utilizing a green PoS mechanism that minimizes energy consumption.

Accessible: Building on Velas is a breeze with its extensive developer tools and EVM/Solidity support.

Velas

Bifrost is a multichain middleware platform that enables developers to create Decentralized Applications (DApps) on top of multiple protocols. Not restrained to a single blockchain, Bifrost creates a new environment where developers can combine the best protocols to develop substantially more scalable and flexible DApps.

With Bifrost, developers can write smart contracts for multiple blockchain protocols in an unified environment. They simply select the target blockchain for each part of the code, then Bifrost will transpile, compile, and deploy the code into the target blockchains at once. Developers can also easily operate their DApps and even switch the target blockchain as new and better protocols become available.

Bifrost has multiple components that allow for a seamless connection among all blockchains:

Recipe: A language application that defines the programming language of Bifrost and generates smart contract codes with guaranteed code-level flexibility.

Linker: A system that connects the user and Bifrost components, ensuring the seamless operation on top of multiple blockchains.

Builder: An Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that offers a customized environment to use the comprehensive suite of features of Bifrost.

Gourmet: An automated testing environment for Bifrost service and smart contract development, updating with the latest technologies for blockchain.

Scan: A dashboard that provides you with a full view of the internal process of Bifrost and shows your blockchain interconnectivity in diagram.

Bifrost

saffron.finance

Fantom is a directed acyclic graph (DAG) smart contract platform providing decentralized finance (DeFi) services to developers using its own bespoke consensus algorithm.

Together with its in-house token FTM, Fantom aims to solve problems associated with smart-contract platforms, specifically transaction speed, which developers say they have reduced to under two seconds.

The Fantom Foundation, which oversees the Fantom product offering, was originally created in 2018, with the launch of OPERA, Fantom’s mainnet, coming in December 2019.

Fantom is an open-source decentralized smart contract platform for DApps and digital assets that was created as an alternative to Ethereum. Fantom has the goal of overcoming the limitations of previous generation blockchains and balancing three components: scalability, security and decentralization. The project offers a set of tools to simplify the process of integrating existing DApps, as well as a detailed staking reward system and built-in DeFi instruments.

Fantom is a Layer-1 blockchain that uses a scratch-built consensus mechanism and independent consensus layer, Lachesis, to facilitate DeFi and related services on the basis of smart contracts. Lachesis provides security for other layers as well, including Opera, Fantom's EVM-compatible smart contract chain. The long-playing mission of the project is to “grant compatibility between all transaction bodies around the world.”

One of Fantom's key strengths is its performance and efficient transaction processing, namely thousands of transactions per second, where transactions are settled in 1-2 seconds, and the cost is fractions of a cent per transaction. As a result, Fantom provides higher scalability but at a lower cost.

The ecosystem is based on two main technologies: Lachesis protocol and Opera.

The Lachesis protocol is the core consensus layer that secures the Fantom network by providing both transaction speed and security.

Lachesis is an aBFT consensus engine that uses a directed acyclic graph (DAG) algorithm. How it works: network data can be processed at different times, and the network filters the participants, allowing only one third, which are allocated due to erroneous or malicious behavior, without compromising network processes.

Fantom's Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant (aBFT) Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism maintains the efficiency of the entire network, its design provides security at maximum speed. Fantom developers emphasize that the PoS mechanism is a leaderless phenomenon — there are no leaders of blocks and participants, and anyone can join (or leave) the network of nodes at a convenient moment.

The key qualities of Lachesis are: asynchronous, leaderless, Byzantine fault-tolerant, and near-instant finality.

As for Opera, it's an application development layer or Fantom's mainnet deployment platform, permissionless and open-source hosting DApps. Thanks to EVM integration and support for the Solidity programming language, Fantom has a full set of smart contract capabilities, which allows users to seamlessly interact with Ethereum platforms while maintaining the advantage of Fantom's transaction efficiency.

The Fantom Foundation concluded that removing block leaders improves network security, so Opera uses a PoS model and leaderless validators (validators do not determine which blocks are valid).

In addition to being a fast, secure and cheap payment platform that enables to make fast and secure payments at minimal cost, Fantom also features on-chain governance where users vote with FTM tokens (one token equals one vote). Of the features: users have the right to express the degree of agreement / disagreement on a scale from 0 to 4.

FTM is the native utility in-house PoS token of Fantom that powers the ecosystem and is applied for payments, network fees, staking, and governance. FTM forms the backbone of transactions, and allows fee collection and staking activities, along with the user rewards the latter represents.