By Michael Chen and Michael Kong

Hey Fantomians, over the past few weeks we have received an increasing amount of questions about the launch-date of our first mainnet, the progress on the Go-Lachesis based mainnet, and the Statheros project.

Today, I would like to offer some clarity to our community about the current timeline that we have in place, and what you can expect from Fantom before the end of 2019. As we discussed previously, we are currently bracing ourselves for a Statheros-based mainnet launch in the near future together with a major bank, but ever since we started we’ve always liked to bring more to the table than initially bargained for. Our mainnet technology stack has been ready for a couple of months now, but we are still confirming a launch date. We are also delighted to share that we are in late stages of development for the Lachesis-Rs and Go-Lachesis repositories on our Github, and we are looking to launch our Rust based-mainnet and Golang-based mainnet before the end of the year.

This would put the amounts of mainnet launched based on Fantom technology to be at three, which we believe is a huge benefit to adoption of the FTM token and the ecosystem. Aside from this informal letter, we would also like to put forward a more formal roadmap going forward from here, and we’ll be revamping the website and all the other quality of life changes necessary to prepare everyone for the three upcoming mainnet launches.

Notes by Michael Kong down below:

Go-Lachesis

We’ve received a lot of questions about Go-Lachesis as a lot of community members and developers are waiting to experiment and build use cases on top of our most puristic form of public blockchain infrastructure. We’ve been making strides on the Go-lachesis repository, but have decided to move it to the end of the year to implement StairDag which is tremendously helpful in optimising the network.

Rust Implementation

For our Rust implementation we are looking to finalise our experimental consensus in November, and we are looking to introduce staking and ecosystem tools at the End of December. The same ecosystem tools can be also be used on the Go-lang implementation, which allows us to work on both repositories without cannibalizing one another.

We structured the development in a way where the Golang implementation (worked on by Quan Nguyen and Sfxdx) is competing against the Rust implementation by offscale.io. Both implementations will be benchmarked against one another, and the other existing implementations such as Babble and Raft, to help us increase scalability and performance.

The reason for postponing the launch of a Fantom issued mainnet with smart contract support is that in our research and development, we discovered faster and more secure ways to achieve consensus. We determined that it would be beneficial to our network performance to implement these ideas before launch, and we believe that this extra time will be well worth the wait.

As always, all of our research and codebases are publicly available to scrutinise and received feedback. We thank you for your continued support.

Best regards,

The Fantom Team