By Michael Chen

Since its inception, the Fantom Foundation has pivoted its vision and goals repeatedly to suit the demands of its potential users. Adapting to the demands of the enterprise and consumer markets is crucial for Fantom to flourish, instead of getting buried across a scurry of ‘’Ethereum killers’’ which appear and disappear with each hype cycle in the blockchain industry.

We believe that this constant pivoting has been beneficial to building technology that people want to use, but it has made it increasingly difficult for our community to grasp what we’re doing exactly. That’s why we want to elaborate the current vision and state of Fantom throughout this article.

Consensus-as-a-Service (CaaS)

As stated before in the ‘Fantom Status’ article published by Andre Cronje, the focus of Fantom is not to build the best blockchain available, but to build the best consensus available. To backtrack a little bit on that, we have to understand what your general blockchain looks like.

I think the Cosmos Intro page really nails it.

From an architecture standpoint, blockchains can be divided into three conceptual layers: Application: Responsible for updating the state given a set of transactions, i.e. processing transactions. Networking: Responsible for the propagation of transactions and consensus-related messages. Consensus: Enables nodes to agree on the current state of the system.

Solutions like Tendermint pBFT are essentially a bundle of the networking layer and consensus layer, and that‘s also the type of solution that Fantom is focusing on. Instead of preparing the first mainnet launches with our own SDK or virtual machines, we opted to make sure that our consensus is compatible with the likes of Cosmos SDK and the Ethereum Virtual Machine so that we can focus on our specialty and what we believe sets us apart from others.

Ecosystem

We also want to make a clear separation between the consensus and all the other modules or use cases being built on top of it. The decentralized exchange, NFT and smart contract support, stable coin issuance frameworks, and decentralized finance modules are not what define Fantom, but they are tools or valid use cases that go really well with the consensus.

The above also applies to XAR Network and Fantom. The structure in this relationship is that Fantom is providing consensus, and XAR is combining that with Cosmos SDK to issue a chain which is suitable for banks to issue stable coins on top of. That does not mean that Fantom is specifically focused on bringing banks to blockchain technology, but rather that Fantom will support that specific use case because it is a valid use case for the consensus.

So at the end of the day, even if demand subsides for any of the use cases or modules mentioned above, we still have an unique consensus algorithm that we will continue to innovate on and improve, instead of becoming a jack of all trades that divides its attention across too many venues.