Key takeaways:
- Fantom has flipped Binance Smart Chain on the tailwind of a strong performance in the past week, which saw its TVL increase by nearly 50%
- Cross-chain protocol Multichain accounts for the largest share of Fantom’s TVL
- Fantom’s rapid rise in the number of decentralized applications deployed on its ecosystem was a result of a massive 370M FTM incentive program that started last August
Fantom is now the third-largest DeFi network in terms of TVL
Fantom, the rapidly growing proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain platform and one of Ethereum’s fiercest competitors has reached a major milestone – Fantom has flipped Binance Smart Chain (BSC) in terms of the total value locked (TVL) on its network to become the third-largest decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem in crypto.
According to blockchain analytics firm DeFiLlama, Fantom has increased its TVL by nearly 50% in the past seven days, whereas nearly all DeFi chains experienced significant, double-digit drops in TVL in the same time period. With $11.77 billion locked in various decentralized applications running on its chain, Fantom trails only Terra ($16.15B TVL) and Ethereum ($111.36B TVL). It is worth noting that Ethereum’s DeFi dominance continues to slip at a fast rate, and currently accounts for 58.7% of TVL across all chains, down from 95.2% in August 2020.
Cross-chain protocol Multichain (MULTI) accounts for the biggest share of Fantom’s TVL, with $6.9 billion, which is good for a 58.5% dominance. Multichain was also the single largest relative gainer in terms of TVL in the last week, as the total value locked in the interoperability protocol increased by 73%.
The rapid rise of Fantom can in large part be attributed to the massive incentive program for decentralized application developers that the Fantom Foundation started last August. A total of 370 million FTM (worth $300M at the time, $765M at current market rates) have been committed for the deployment of DeFi projects to the highly scalable Layer 1 platform.
Now, only six months later, the strategy has already started paying off in a big way. More than 120 projects are currently deployed on the network. The success of the platform is mirrored in its native token FTM, which is one of the rare digital assets still up since last month.
FTM was not immune to the significantly bearish trend that is recently permeating the markets. The price of FTM decreased by more than 30% in the past week, which is surprisingly better than several of its Layer 1 DeFi competitors. Case in point, Solana (-39%), Avalanche (-34%), Near Protocol (-45%), and Algorand (-35%) are all down more than FTM, while having lost a significant chunk of their respective TVL at the same time.
