In an increasingly digitalized world, the demand for decentralized solutions that provide transparency, security, and efficiency is on the rise. Current solutions make trade-offs between three components: scalability, security, and decentralization.
Fantom aims to solve this through its high-speed consensus mechanism, Lachesis. Allowing an ecosystem to grow and scale at unprecedented speeds without the need to sacrifice security and decentralization.
Let’s explore how Fantom works and what it brings to the Osmosis Ecosystem.
What is Fantom?
Fantom is a smart contract platform that allows applications to be built on top of it. Fantom is powered by Lachesis, an advanced DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) based aBFT(asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant) consensus algorithm. Blockchains built on Fantom are fast, secure, and highly scalable. Fantom was created with the goal of being adopted across enterprises and businesses without needing to sacrifice decentralization, security, and speed.
What is a Consensus Algorithm?
In blockchain, this is the process or mechanism by which agreement of data value is reached across a network. This lays the foundation for decentralization as it removes the need for a central authority and allows the network to order events in a trustless manner. As such, there are various consensus mechanisms, each attempting to solve the blockchain trilemma of decentralization, security, and scalability.
Fantom and the Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant Consensus
In a decentralized world where no central entity can hold validation power, the consensus protocol ensures all participants in the network can achieve an agreement in a trustless way. In this sense, the aBFT consensus aims to improve the limitations of the Byzantine Fault Tolerant model. Byzantine Fault Tolerance is a network’s ability to continue operating even if one third of its nodes fail or act maliciously. Blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum are synchronous, this means that transactions occur in blocks linearly, following an order of events requiring multiple confirmations leading to slower finality.
In aBFT networks:
- Nodes can reach consensus independently
- Blocks do not need to reach finality
- Consensus is reached in a leaderless manner
As a result, aBFT networks allow for greater decentralization and scalability, as communication is minimized.
The Lachesis Consensus
In order to achieve high finality speed, Lachesis operates under the concept of absolute finality. Lachesis is Fantom’s aBFT consensus algorithm. As we would expect, Lachesis is asynchronous, leaderless, Byzantine Fault-Tolerant, and final. This means transactions cannot be reversed once included in a block. As a comparison, Bitcoin has a finality of thirty to sixty minutes, while Ethereum’s finality is around one minute.
How does it work?
Instead of ordering blocks linearly, each Lachesis Node stores blocks in a DAG. Unlike a blockchain, which consists of blocks, DAGs are composed of edges and vertices. This allows for transactions to be ordered in vertices and to be processed on top of one another because of this ability to stack new transactions onto old ones.
Blockchain Networks vs. DAGs
Unlike most POS networks, in Lachesis, events are categorized into unconfirmed if they are new blocks and confirmed if they are event blocks past the 2 to 3 frames. To minimize the amount of communication needed between nodes, event blocks are the only ones that are synced between nodes. This is meant to reduce the overhead of communication between participants of the network and optimize finality speeds.
The Opera Mainnet
Powered by Lachesis, Opera is a fully decentralized network with smart contracts integration for applications. This means Opera is leaderless, able to offer fast finality, and is EVM-compatible.
- Leaderless: In the Opera Mainnet, validators do not determine block validity.
- Fast Finality: Leveraging the Lachesis consensus mechanism, Opera is able to achieve absolute finality. Previous consensus mechanisms used by Bitcoin and previously Ethereum made instant finality impossible ( e.g.Bitcoin 60 minutes)
- EVM Compatible: Opera supports Solidity and Vyper; this enables developers to write code as easily as they would on Ethereum, minimizing friction.
Fantom is elegantly designed to be leaderless, asynchronous, and byzantine fault-tolerant. As such, its mainnet mechanism, Opera powered by Lachesis, allows it to remain flexible, fast, and secure in order to scale real-world applications that require fast finality.
Fantom on Osmosis
Listing Fantom’s FTM token was a no-brainer for Osmosis. Fantom is the 7th largest cryptocurrency by TVL. As such, Fantom and Osmosis users will no longer need to visit a centralized exchange to access the FTM token, and bridge back to their respective ecosystems.
As such, Fantom and Osmosis users will no longer need to visit a centralized exchange to access the FTM token, and bridge back to their respective ecosystems. This is key for Osmosis, as it evolves into a one stop shop for everything DeFi and expands its list of available assets.