By Michael Chen

Over the past few weeks, maybe even months, Fantom has seen a lot of speculation around what the next step may be for the Foundation in terms of integrations that we’re working on, which regions we’re tackling, and so forth. That also comes with its fair share of rumours being created, or misinformation being spread, so we think it’s important to clarify what the goal is and what the focus is going forward.

Building a DeFi ecosystem around Fantom.

If we look at the space currently, the only place that has substantial DeFi value capture, or any kind of DeFi stack that has all the bells and whistles necessary, is the Ethereum ecosystem. We see some interesting things happening on the Cosmos side of things, partially through Xar, but that still requires adoption and the development of alternatives so that the market can decide what the suitable DeFi suite will be for that community. What Fantom will be focused on, however, is building a made-to-measure DeFi suite around Opera mainnet. We’ll be introducing a multitude of products in Q2, which we believe will be the first full-stack DeFi suite to market outside of the Ethereum ecosystem, aside from Xar.

DeFi has and will always be a key differentiator for our ecosystem, and we’ll share more information about this as we get closer to a launch of these products (rather than sharing too much information early on and hyping things up, we’d like to show our community a product that is tangible and ready for use.)

Blockchain-as-a-service for governments.

With our collaboration with the Ministry of Health in Afghanistan, a lot of doors have opened for the foundation. The initial blockchain program between Fantom and the ministry has already commenced, and is well underway. This will serve as an example for other government partnerships in the Middle-East, if not on a global scale. At the current stage, we’re solidifying leads and prioritizing those that can be converted to hard commitments from government organs, with a focus on digital certification and supply chain tracking. As a means of expanding this, we’re working with V-ID, Chekkit, and many others to reduce the amount of building necessary and to scale the amount of deployment up rapidly to build a strong reputation around the technology on an institutional level.

What does the organizational structure of the Foundation currently look like?

Previously, Fantom was working in a way where everyone was working individually and focused purely on (developer) community building for the mainnet launch. Now that we’ve gone live with Opera mainnet, the organization has naturally gravitated towards certain divisions with a very specific set of responsibilities.

Operations, finances, and general management are in the hands of Michael Kong, who is is advised by Andre Cronje and our financial team. On this side, we’ve focused on sustainability and determining a general budget which allows us to sustain operation and decouple ourselves from the dependence that a lot of project teams have on the general crypto market.

On the business development side, each and every Business Developer has taken ownership of their leads and geographies. With Bariq, Javed, and Habib liaising between Fantom and the Afghan Government, and with Samuel Harcourt focusing on re-opening leads that were set to pending long before mainnet launch in the UAE. We’ve also onboarded business developers who focus on the crypto-to-crypto angle rather than traditional institutions and integrators, to convince other project teams to build on top of Fantom, and to bring as much utility to FTM as possible.

Last but not least, we have the marketing department, which is spearheaded by a smaller group of people. Marketing managers Simone Pomposi and Connor Hughes have been focused on the website, messaging, and the execution of regularities such as the recaps, daily communication, and content creation; whereas I, Michael Chen, have been focused on being a liaison between Fantom and its partners to drive co-marketing pushes and large campaigns.

For more information about the vision and direction of Fantom, please wait for the updated roadmap for 2020 which will be released before the end of February 2020.