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Newbie Catchup: The A-Z of NFTs

## What Is WAX (WAXP)?

WAX (WAXP) is a purpose-built blockchain, released in 2017, that is designed to make e-commerce transactions faster, simpler and safer for every party involved. The WAX blockchain uses delegated proof-of-stake (DPoS) as its consensus mechanism. It is fully compatible with EOS.

The custom features and the incentive mechanisms developed by WAX are intended to optimize the blockchain’s utility specifically for use in e-commerce, with the goal of encouraging voting on proposals. 

To make this possible, WAX created a suite of blockchain-based tools which decentralized application ([DApp](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/decentralized-applications-dapps)) marketplaces and non-fungible tokens can be built upon.

Services such as WAX Cloud Wallet, SSO and OAUTH support e-commerce operations, the latter being a native RNG service and a developer portal. WAX’s blockchain architecture supports 500-millisecond block time and zero-fee transactions for customers. It also makes use of voting rewards to incentivize participation in the selection of block producers and improvement proposals.


### Who Are the Founders of WAX?

WAX was co-founded by William Quigley and Jonathan Yantis.

William Quigley studied at the University of Southern California, and then worked at Disney. After leaving Disney in the early 1990s, he got an MBA at Harvard and became a venture capitalist. Over time, he became the managing director at Idealab. Alongside creating WAX, he is also the managing director at Magnetic.

Jonathan Yantis works as the chief operating officer at WAX and as the chief operating officer at OPSkins.


#### What Makes WAX Unique?

WAX features a WAXP-to-Ethereum ([ETH](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum/)) bridge that allows WAXP token holders to convert their tokens into WAXE, which is an Ethereum-based ERC20 utility token.

Users willing to participate in WAX tokenomics need to burn their WAXP tokens in order to get WAXE through the Ethereum bridge. They will then need to stake the WAXE tokens on the Ethereum distribution contract.

WAXG is an Ethereum-based ERC-20 governance token that is distributed to WAXE stakers. The distribution is based on a set timetable and is proportionate to the percentage of the WAX Economic Activity pool. The token holders can govern the allocation and distribution of economic value on the platform as a result.

The WAX Economic Activity pool is a smart contract that accumulates a percentage of generated WAX fees and can be converted into ETH for distribution to WAXE stakers. It can also be given to WAXG token holders that decide to burn the tokens they already have.


#### Related Pages:

Learn more about [1inch](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/1inch/).

Learn more about [Stacks](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/1inch/).

Learn about Web 3.0 on [CMC Alexandria](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/what-is-web-3-0).

Improve your knowledge in crypto on the [CoinMarketCap blog](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/categories/blog).


#### How Many WAX (WAXP) Coins Are There in Circulation?

WAX (WAXP) has a circulating supply of 1,513,825,734 tokens as of February 2021 and a maximum supply of 3,770,303,327 WAXP.


### How Is the WAX Network Secured?

WAX network’s DPoS consensus is secure against the corruption of a significant minority or producers. Token holders can select WAX guilds by voting in a continuous approval system. They can get an opportunity to produce blocks and token holders can persuade other token holders to vote for them.

A block gets produced on the WAX blockchain every 0.5 seconds; as such, one WAX guild gets authorized to produce a block at any given point in time. If a block does not get produced at the scheduled time, the block for that time slot is skipped. When one or more blocks end up getting skipped, another gap in the blockchain of 0.5 seconds or more is added.

WAX guilds do not receive WAX rewards if they produce 50% or less of the scheduled blocks, which discourages skipping blocks.

WAX has created a full suite of blockchain-based tools that allow anyone to trade digital or physical items instantly and securely.


### Where Can You Buy WAX (WAXP)?

If you are interested in buying WAX (WAXP), it can be done on several exchanges, including the following:

*   [Binance](https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/binance/)
*   [Crypto.com](https://crypto.com/)
*   [Huobi Global](https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/huobi-global/)
*   [Upbit](https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/upbit/)
*   [HitBTC](https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/hitbtc/)
*   [Bithumb](https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/bithumb/)
*   [Bitfinex](https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/bitfinex/)

If you want to learn more about how exactly cryptocurrency buying works, you can learn everything you need to know with CoinMarketCap’s own [guide](https://coinmarketcap.com/how-to-buy-bitcoin/).


Enjin Coin is a project of Enjin, a company that provides an ecosystem of interconnected, blockchain-based gaming products. Enjin's flagship offering is the Enjin Network, a social gaming platform through which users can create websites and clans, chat, and host virtual item stores.

Enjin allows game developers to tokenize in-game items on the Ethereum blockchain. It uses Enjin Coin, an ERC-20 token, to back the digital assets issued using its platform, meaning that items can be bought, sold and traded with real-world value.

Enjin Coin was first announced in July 2017, and it launched on the Ethereum mainnet in June 2018.

Enjin Coin (ENJ) is a digital store of value used to back the value of blockchain assets like non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Every asset minted with the Enjin Platform contains ENJ, a minting resource which is locked inside NFTs and removed from circulation. Minting blockchain assets with ENJ provides a variety of benefits to creators and users:

Infuses them with a reserve value

Ensures their transparency and scarcity

Gives them instant liquidity

Provides utility in games and apps

Anti-inflationary

Enjin's "melting" functionality allows users to destroy their blockchain assets at any time to retrieve the ENJ value from within.

The Enjin blockchain ecosystem aims to offer software products that make it easy for everyone to develop, trade, monetize, and market with blockchain.

Founded in 2009, Enjin has roots in the gaming industry, with the company’s first product, a gaming community platform called the Enjin Network, growing to 20 million users over the course of a decade.

In 2017 following an ICO, Enjin established itself as a leading blockchain ecosystem developer, building a suite of software products that enable anyone to easily mint, manage, trade, distribute, and integrate blockchain assets.

Enjin’s co-founder Witek Radomski wrote the code for one of the first ever non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and is also the co-author of the ERC-1155 Ethereum token standard.

Built on top of an on-chain infrastructure, the Enjin ecosystem enables game developers and businesses of all sizes to use tokenized digital assets as part of their acquisition, retention, engagement, and monetization strategies. The Enjin ecosystem is fueled by Enjin Coin (ENJ), a cryptocurrency used to back the value of blockchain assets.

Enjin Coin

Alien Worlds (TLM) is a decentralized, non-fungible token (NFT) metaverse, where players compete for scarce resources, Trilium (TLM), in a stimulated economy centered around planetary worlds. Due to this, Alien Worlds also has a decentralized finance (DeFi) element to the game, as players advance by staking TLM and using TLM to vote in Planet Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs).

Play-to-earn (P2E) NFT games have seen an exponential rise in popularity and value this year. Alien Worlds allow the players, called “explorers” to earn monetary rewards through gameplay or participation in Planet DAOs. By mining in Alien Worlds, a user is rewarded with the native, in-game currency — Trilium (TLM) or NFT packs. Players can stake TLM to boost their rewards or battle with other users for NFTs.

To date, Alien Worlds has established a fair amount of its roadmap, having TLM on Binance launchpad and farming period of TLM on Binance Launchpool. A large portion of game developments have been forged as well. Moving forward, Alien Worlds aims to automate the claiming process of daily allocation to landowners in the game. Artifacts NFTs are soon to be released, and future plans include NFT interoperability.

Alien Worlds

Harmony is a blockchain platform designed to facilitate the creation and use of decentralized applications (DApps). The network aims to innovate the way decentralized applications work by focusing on random state sharding, which allows creating blocks in seconds.

According to the project’s website, Harmony is expected to introduce cross-shard contracts and a cross-chain infrastructure by the end of 2021.

Harmony

Decentraland (MANA) defines itself as a virtual reality platform powered by the Ethereum blockchain that allows users to create, experience, and monetize content and applications.

In this virtual world, users purchase plots of land that they can later navigate, build upon and monetize.

Decentraland was launched following a $24 million initial coin offering (ICO) that was conducted in 2017. The virtual world launched its closed beta in 2019 and opened to the public in February 2020. Since then, users have created a wide range of experiences on their parcels of LAND, including interactive games, sprawling 3D scenes and a variety of other interactive experiences.

Decentraland uses two tokens: MANA and LAND. MANA is an ERC-20 token that must be burned to acquire non-fungible ERC-721 LAND tokens. MANA tokens can also be used to pay for a range of avatars, wearables, names, and more on the Decentraland marketplace.

Decentraland (MANA) is a decentralized virtual world platform with software based on the Ethereum blockchain, where users create, test and monetize content. In short: users buy virtual plots of land as NFTs with MANA tokens on the Decentraland platform. Progress in the game depends only on players themselves, their efforts and their imagination.

The digital platform is completely owned by its users. Within the Decentraland metaverse, participants can explore the virtual world, purchase plots of land that can be monetized, create works of art, own non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and take part in a decentralized autonomous organization of the platform Decentraland DAO. Due to the DAO, the community influences the development vector of the project.

In addition, users have access to interactive applications, in-world payments and peer-to-peer communication. The 3D world resonates with many participants as Decentraland has many applications, both entertainment for gamers and business for investors.

Two types of tokens called MANA and LAND govern operations in Decentraland. They also allow users to interact with the platform.

MANA is the official currency of Decentraland. It’s an ERC-20 standard token that powers the Decentraland platform. With MANA, users can purchase plots of LAND, as well as pay for in-game items and services.

MANA gives its holders the right to vote in Decentraland DAO. MANA can be purchased on a cryptocurrency exchange or by selling collectibles on Decentraland Marketplace. The owner of tokens converts them to wrapped MANA, or wMANA, and then commits them to the DAO. One wMANA equals one vote. MANA can be exchanged for fiat currency and other digital assets.

As for LAND, it’s a non-fungible token (NFT) based on Ethereum (ETH). It is used to track ownership of land parcels aka digital real estate. Like MANA, LAND is part of the protocol and confers voting rights, but LAND does not need to be fixed in the DAO. One LAND is equal to two thousand votes.

Players choose what to do with their land. Owners store tokens in crypto wallets and buy necessities with MANA tokens on the Decentraland Marketplace. Moreover, on the marketplace, participants can manage or exchange LAND tokens (priced in MANA). Holders use the marketplace to transact or transfer in-game items. All transactions are conducted, regulated and registered via the Ethereum blockchain.

Decentraland combines an online gaming space and blockchain technology. All control over the rules is given to the players, and token holders vote on in-game and organizational policies. The original goal was to form a decentralized virtual reality, but in practice, Decentraland has turned into a massive NFT market.

A special role in Decentraland is assigned to NFTs, such as collectibles, virtual equipment and real estate (LAND). However, for new players who want to join the universe and seize NFTs, the entry barrier will be high.

The Decentraland protocol is built on three levels using Ethereum smart contracts. On the consensus layer, the ownership of LAND is tracked and managed. The land content layer displays the content of the Decentraland virtual world. Finally, on the real-time layer, participants interact with each other.

The platform was co-founded by two blockchain experts, Ari Meilich and Esteban Ordano, in 2015. Officially it was launched a year later and became available only in February 2020, gradually turning from a 2D experiment into a full-fledged 3D world.

To sum up, Decentraland is a decentralized game and a 3D virtual reality platform where players own lands and create limitlessly. Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) software is at the core, and governance is in the hands of the community. Through the native token MANA, players participate in any proposals for managing and improving the ecosystem, the auction system, and the in-game policy.

Decentraland

Launched in 2011 by Pixowl, The Sandbox is a blockchain-based virtual world allowing users to create, build, buy and sell digital assets in the form of a game. By combining the powers of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), the Sandbox creates a decentralized platform for a thriving gaming community.

According to the official whitepaper, the Sandbox platform’s main mission is to introduce blockchain technology in mainstream gaming successfully. The platform focuses on facilitating a creative “play-to-earn” model, which allows users to be both creators and gamers simultaneously. The Sandbox employs the powers of blockchain technology by introducing the SAND utility token, which facilitates transactions on the platform.

The Sandbox

Gala is a web3 ecosystem powered by a layer-1 blockchain (GalaChain) built to power the Gala entertainment ecosystem that originally included Gala Games, Gala Music and Gala Film. More recently however, GalaChain has opened its doors to external developers and projects from any applicable industry, providing open source developer resources to simplify the process.

On a mission to empower users and creators across multiple industries throughout the world, Gala’s goal is to become the first billion user blockchain in the world. Innovators can extend the benefits of web3 to their users and communities more easily than ever before by leveraging open source tools like the GalaChain SDK and Creator Portal.

By elevating their ideas to web3 through GalaChain, developers can create custom tokens, smart contracts, reward opportunities and node networks for their communities and projects. Assets built on GalaChain can also be bridged to other blockchains, such as Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain and more. Developers who wish to learn more about getting involved with GalaChain are welcome to reach out via GalaChain.com.

The core of GalaChain is powered by its DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network) of Founder’s Nodes, whose operators earn daily $GALA rewards for actively providing resources to the ecosystem and enjoy governance voting rights on certain core Gala decisions. In addition to the Founder’s Node network’s foundational workload, individual projects can also create Node networks on GalaChain with more specific workloads.

Gala.com
News.Gala.com
Games.Gala.com
Music.Gala.com
Film.Gala.com

Gala

Chromia is a modular, relational blockchain platform that aims to make it easy for people to build decentralized applications (DApps). It was founded by ChromaWay, a company that has been working on blockchain solutions since 2014 for various sectors such as finance, real estate, gaming and public services. ChromaWay is also known for creating colored coins, which are user-defined assets on a blockchain that can represent anything from currencies to stocks to collectibles.

Chromia’s vision is to enable a new generation of DApps that can scale beyond what is currently possible and address real-world problems in various domains such as gaming, social media, finance, healthcare, education, governance, and more.

Some examples of DApps on Chromia include: My Neighbor Alice (ALICE), a multiplayer blockchain game; LAC PropertyChain, a land registry system; Green Assets Wallet, a platform for green bond verification; Hedget (HGET),  a decentralized options protocol; Corite (CO), a music streaming service; Chain of Alliance (COA), a strategy game; Vault12, a digital asset custody solution; Domenation, a blockchain gaming project.

Chromia

Audius is a decentralized music streaming protocol initially built on POA network, but now living on Solana. Audius was launched to remedy the inefficiencies of the music industry, which is plagued by intransparent music rights ownership and intermediaries standing between artists and their audience.

Audius aims to align the interests of artists, fans, and node operators through its platform powered by its native AUDIO token. Artists can upload music, stored and distributed by content and discovery nodes, that fans can listen to for free. Currently, Audius rewards content creators through rewards like featuring in the weekly trending lists. In the future, it plans to integrate stablecoins for artists to offer paid content, as well as artist tokens that give fans the ability to access exclusive content, potentially cooperating with platforms like Rally.

Audius

Zilliqa is a public, permissionless blockchain that is designed to offer high throughput with the ability to complete thousands of transactions per second. It seeks to solve the issue of blockchain scalability and speed by employing sharding as a second-layer scaling solution. The platform is home to many decentralized applications, and as of October 2020, it also allows for staking and yield farming.

Development work officially started on Zilliqa in June 2017, and its testnet went live in March 2018. A little over a year later, in June 2019, the platform launched its mainnet.

The native utility token of Zilliqa, ZIL, is used to process transactions on the network and execute smart contracts.

Zilliqa

Flow

Axie Infinity is a blockchain-based trading and battling game that is partially owned and operated by its players.

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

Inspired by popular games like Pokémon and Tamagotchi, Axie Infinity allows players to collect, breed, raise, battle and trade token-based creatures known as Axies.

These Axies can take various forms, and there are more than 500 different body parts available, including aquatic, beast, bird, bug, plant and reptile parts. Parts from each type class come in four different rarity scales: common, rare, ultra rare and legendary — and Axies can have any combination of body parts, making them highly variable and often rare and unique.

Each Axie is a non-fungible token (NFT) with different attributes and strengths and can be entered into 3v3 battles, with the winning team earning more experience (exp) points that are used to level up an Axie's stats or evolve their body parts. These Axies can be bred together to produce new and unique offspring, which can be used or sold on the Axie marketplace.

The Axie Infinity ecosystem also has its own unique governance token, known as Axie Infinity Shards (AXS). These are used to participate in key governance votes and will give holders a say in how funds in the Axie Community Treasury are spent.

Axie Infinity

LRC is the Ethereum-based cryptocurrency token of Loopring, an open protocol designed for the building of decentralized crypto exchanges.

In 2020, the average daily trading volume of the entire cryptocurrency market fluctuated in the approximate range of $50-$200 million. Most of that trading is conducted on centralized cryptocurrency exchanges — online platforms operated by private companies that store users’ funds and facilitate the matching of buy and sell orders.

Such platforms have a number of downsides common to all of them, so a new type of exchange — decentralized— has emerged to try to alleviate these disadvantages. However, fully decentralized exchanges are not without their own flaws.

Loopring’s purported goal is to combine centralized order matching with decentralized on-blockchain order settlement into a hybridized product that will take the best aspects of both centralized and decentralized exchanges.

LRC tokens became available to the public during an initial coin offering (ICO) in August 2017, while the Loopring protocol was first deployed on Ethereum mainnet in December 2019.

Loopring

Theta Network

Chiliz is the leading digital currency for sports and entertainment by the eponymous Malta-based FinTech provider. It operates the blockchain-based sports entertainment platform Socios, which enables users to participate in the governance of their favorite sports brands. Multiple fan tokens by Socios.com are an example of that. For sports clubs and associations, fan tokens offer a way of connecting with their fans and unlocking new revenue streams.

For instance, fans can participate and influence club-related decisions through surveys and polls, such as messages the captain should wear on his armband. The company aims to bridge the gap between being an active and a passive fan. Chiliz has developed partnerships with some of the biggest sporting institutions in the world: FC Barcelona, Manchester City, Juventus Turin, and Paris Saint-Germain. It also boasts partnerships with the UFC and gaming organizations. By purchasing CHZ, fans get access to various fan tokens and literally have a stake in their club.

Chiliz

Starting as an open-source project in 2017, IoTeX has built a decentralized platform whose aim is to empower the open economics for machines — an open ecosystem where people and machines can interact with guaranteed trust, free will, and under properly designed economic incentives.

With a global team of over 40 research scientists and engineers, IoTeX has built their EVM-compatible blockchain from scratch using the innovative Roll-DPoS consensus and launched in 2019 April, which has been running by 100+ delegates worldwide and has processed more than 10 million transactions already. On top of the IoTeX blockchain, the team has built the essential blocks of infrastructures to connect with Ethereum, BSC, and Heco blockchains such as ioPay wallet (https://iopay.me/) and ioTube bridge (https://iotube.org/), which serve ten thousands of users. IoTeX helps EVM-based DApps scale without concerning expensive gas fees!

Besides, middleware such as Decentralized Identity, Confidential Computing, and Secure Hardware has been built on top of the IoTeX blockchain. This has enabled the creation of self-sovereign devices such as Ucam, and real-world data oracles like Pebble. Ucam (https://ucam.iotex.io/) has been deployed to over 3000 households (http://iott.network/). Meanwhile, Pebble has been launched to more than 300 developers initially, and enables innovative Dapps to connect the physical world with the crypto world, such as real-world NFTs, weather derivatives and machine learning-as-mining.

IoTeX

Basic Attention Token, or BAT, is the token that powers a new blockchain-based digital advertising platform designed to fairly reward users for their attention, while providing advertisers with a better return on their ad spend.

To learn more about this project, check out our deep dive of Basic Attention Token.

This experience is delivered through the Brave Browser, where users can watch privacy-preserving adverts and receive BAT rewards for doing so. On the other hand, advertisers can deliver targeted ads to maximize engagement and cut down losses due to ad fraud and abuse.

The Basic Attention Token itself is the unit of reward in this advertising ecosystem, and is exchanged between advertisers, publishers and users. Advertisers pay for their advertising campaigns in BAT tokens. Out of this budget, a small portion is distributed to advertisers, while 70% is distributed to users — whereas the intermediaries that typically drive up advertising costs are cut out of the equation to improve cost-efficiency.

Basic Attention Token launched in 2017 following one of the fastest sell-out initial coin offerings (ICOs) of all time, with the platform raising a total of $35 million in under a minute. Since then, it has rolled out its attention-based advertising experience to users in most countries through its Brave Rewards program.

As of November 2020, the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada had the most active advertising campaigns.

Basic Attention Token

Kadena is a proof-of-work blockchain that combines the PoW consensus mechanism from Bitcoin with directed acyclic graph (DAG) principles to offer a scalable version of Bitcoin. Kadena claims it can provide the security of Bitcoin while being able to offer unparalleled throughput that makes the blockchain usable to enterprises and entrepreneurs alike. Kadena's unique infrastructure is decentralized and built for mass adoption because of its multi-chain approach.

Kadena promises industrial scalability that can support global financial systems and can be scaled as necessary. It also vows to remain energy-efficient at scale and deliver more transactions with the same energy input, another difference to Bitcoin. Moreover, Kadena offers crypto gas stations, which allow businesses to pay for their customers' gas fees and remove a massive pain point in adopting blockchains for business.

Kadena has already scaled its network from 10 to 20 blockchains and can do so again in the future, if necessary. This final addition to Kadena was its private Kuro layer-two blockchain, which supports up to 8,000 transactions per second across 500 nodes.

Kadena

Hive (HIVE) is a blockchain running on a delegated proof-of-stake (DPoS) consensus mechanism. It launched in March 2020 as a hard fork of the centralized Steem blockchain and as a gateway from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0. The blockchain claims to offer “lightning-fast processing times and fee-less transactions.” Examples of use cases include social media with monetized rewards for content creators, interactive blockchain games, identity management, micro-loans and more. The platform powers decentralized applications (dApps) like Splinterlands, PeakD and HiveBlog.

Hive is a social network of apps and services, where users discover the capacity of blockchain technology, connect to the platform and securely share content through equitable redistribution of value. Thus, the users are the proprietors of the network, and sponsors can contact communities and artists directly without intermediaries.

Hive is an open source blockchain that focuses on scaling through layer-2 sidechains, while still benefiting from a common layer-1 blockchain backbone to ensure distributed data integrity. The Hive ecosystem runs on two cryptocurrencies — the native governance token, HIVE and the USD-pegged HBD stablecoin.

Hive

Illuvium is an open-world fantasy battle game built on the Ethereum blockchain. Often touted as the first AAA game on Ethereum, Illuvium looks to provide a source of entertainment to both casual gamers and hardcore DeFi fans through a range of collecting and trading features.

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

The world of Illuvium is inhabited by creatures known as Illuvials, who can be captured by players that best them in battle and nurse them back to health. From then on, they become a loyal part of the player’s collection and can be used when battling other adventurers as part of Illuvium’s auto battler gameplay.

The game is a fusion between an open-world exploration game and a PVP battle game. Players can spend their time exploring the expanses of the game world or building up their team of powerful beasts.

Illuvium has been in development since 2020, and is being built by a worldwide team of more than 40 individuals, including the co-founders; serial entrepreneur and early cryptocurrency adopter Kieran Warwick, and experienced game designer Aaron Warwick, who are brothers. (And who are coincidentally also the brothers of Kain Warwick, the co-founder of DeFi platform Synthetix).

The ILV token has a number of uses within the Illuvium ecosystem. It’s the main token used to reward players for their in-game achievements, entitles players to their share of the Illuvium Vault and is used for participating in the governance of the game via the Illuvium decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).

Illuvium

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.