Fantom Sneaks Up the DeFi and NFT Leaderboards

The decentralized finance (DeFi) market has been growing by leaps and bounds, and from the looks of it, it is not slowing down anytime soon. There is currently $205.5 billion in total value locked (TVL) in the DeFi segment, and rising.

While there is no shortage of coins or ways to play this market, a few blockchains are taking an increasingly large slice of the DeFi pie. Fantom Opera, a decentralized smart contract platform that’s meant to be fast, cheap, and secure, is one of them.

Fantom’s TVL hovers at $4.8 billion at last check. For context, over the past week, its TVL was recently hovering at $2.07 billion and jumped nearly 58% to $3.27 billion, as illustrated by Coin98 Analytics below. Now Fantom’s TVL is already barreling toward the $5 billion threshold as more decentralized apps (Dapps) continue to build on the platform.

Dapps and NFTs

Not only is Fantom’s TVL growing but so too are some of the Dapps on the platform. Lending market protocol Geist Finance, for example, boasts a TVL of $2.6 billion, and it just launched on Oct. 6.

Fantom also participates in another burgeoning cryptocurrency niche — non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which is traditionally Ethereum’s turf. Fantom developers are behind the NFT marketplace called Artion for creators and collectors. According to one popular NFT collector, known as Tinfoilrealist.eth on Twitter, Fantom NFTs have piqued the interest of ETH NFT collectors.

There's alot of ETH NFT Collectors reaching out about Fantom NFTs….

— Tinfoilrealist.eth (@TinFoilRealist) October 13, 2021

Fantom has also made it easy to bridge from the Ethereum blockchain to Fantom.

According to stats by the Fantom Foundation, the project’s ecosystem has 880,000 unique addresses. Fantom has been completing 750,000 transactions per day, with more than 30,000 smart contracts deployed.

Fantom Token

While Fantom’s TVL has been growing, so too has the Fantom token price. In the last month alone, FTM has soared 46% to just above the $2 level for market cap of $5 billion. While the Fantom price is taking it on the chin today, having fallen almost 3%, cryptocurrencies are volatile and the momentum appears to be on the side of  DeFi.

Fantom has become a force in the DeFi market and is gaining popularity thanks to its speedy transactions and low fees, all of which the project attributes to its aBFT consensus called Lachesis. The Fantom token has already had quite a run, but if the platform’s popularity is any indication, FTM could have more tricks up its sleeve.