Fantom ($FTM) Projects to watch for 2022

The ecosystem with more TVL than market cap continues to provide new use cases in DeFi

Feb 15, 2022

Welcome to the 134 newly Altcoin Evolutionists who have joined us since last issue!

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Hi internet frens👋 ,

Fantom is an ecosystem that broke onto the scene in 2021 and as of writing is up 11976% since the beginning of last year - not bad returns.

With the guidance of Yearn Finance founder Andre Cronje (a huge deal in blockchain), the game for this year is to proliferate the ecosystem and technology through building great applications.

Today we’re taking a look at some of these dApps; what they are, what traction they have achieved and why they are important to the ecosystem.

In part 2 will take a deep dive into the protocol ecosystem as a whole and look at everything from product market fit to 3rd party developer resources… so stay tuned…

And without further ado then let’s do this…

Fantom ($FTM) Ecosystem Analysis

Intro

FANTOM is a DAG-based Smart Contract platform that tries to address the scalability concerns that have plagued distributed ledger systems. The goal is to encourage the creation of dApps that allow all users to benefit from rapid transactions and low transaction fees.

The Fantom Ecosystem market cap today is $211 Billion, a -0.7% change in the last 24 hours.

The growth in the ecosystem cannot be understated, as a quick check lets look at the Fantom ecosystem map 6 months apart (thanks to @fantomians_ for these!)

Let's take a look at a few of them making real progress and some that show promise.

Geist Finance $GEIST

a) What is it?

With a TVL of $1.49b according to DeFiLlama Geist is in the number 2 spot in terms of Fantom Ecosystem rankings, but is first in our list as it’s the highest Fantom only chain.

It is a borrowing and lending protocol that is pretty much identical to Aave.

A key differentiation however is, as Geist puts it:

GEIST is the native token within the Geist protocol. GEIST is a revenue sharing token, not a governance token. The protocol has no concept of governance or ownership, and also no treasury. Instead, 50% of all revenue generated through lending is distributed directly to users who stake GEIST.

GEIST has a total supply of 1,000,000,000.

40% given as incentives for lenders and borrowers, released over a period of five years
20% given as incentives for GEIST/FTM liquidity providers, released over a period of five years
20% allocated for airdrops and incentives to related DeFi communities, happening over a minimum of one year (including Curve gauge bribes and others listed below)
20% to the team, released linearly over one year

The initial reward Tokenomics of GEIST are geared to incentivize borrowing with a weighting of 2:1 in favor of borrowers (who generate revenue for the protocol).

The platform fees work in the following way:

One think to note is that there is a difference between locking and staking GEIST as this infographic shows:

b) Key Statistics

As above Geist has a TVL of $1.49b according to DeFi Llama which makes it one of the most valuable projects in the ecosystem.

Geist’s dashboard shows the locked vs staked totals as follows:

c) Importance to the ecosystem

Geist’s launch played a large part in attracting new money into the ecosystem. While they offered very generous GEIST token rewards IMO the airdrop to holders of Aave and stkAave moved the needle the most - leading to a 36% jump on launch for the FTM token.

As stated above Geist has ~$1.4-1.5b in TVL for a market cap of only $49m! Plus as the borrowing part of GEIST of this will generate fees, which according to it’s dashboard is an estimated $43m to date.

I did some more data crunching on your behalf…

So we’re on track for $1.2m this month but we’ll want to see where these fees end up once all the rewards have been used… The trend is slightly alarming but to be expected. We can then reassess when we have reached a steady state.