Fantom’s FTM Leads Tokens: Sonic Upgrade Spurs Interest

• Fantom has gained over 150% in the past month to become the best-performing crypto that’s not a meme coin in that time as interest in FTM skyrockets.
• The surge is driven by the upcoming Sonic upgrade, which will offer unprecedented storage and scalability to users with one-second finality and 2,000 transactions per second.

While it has been a meme coin bull rally with tokens like Dogwifhat and BOOK OF MEME surging upwards of 600% and 1,200%, respectively, over the past month, one non-meme token has stood out: Fantom. FTM has surged in the past few weeks as an upcoming upgrade drives investor interest in the token.

FTM was trading at 40 cents a month ago before embarking on a rally that took it to a market high of $1.19, the highest it has traded since April 2022. It’s changing hands for $1.05 at press time as its price retraced since the weekend began. Despite losing momentum, the token has gained 19.4% in the past week.

Fantom’s rise has seen FTM set the record for the highest gains for non-meme tokens alongside other major gainers, including Ribbon Finance, Arweave and Jupiter.

While its price was skyrocketing, Fantom’s ecosystem has failed to replicate this growth. The total value locked in its DeFi ecosystem stands at $139.88 million at press time, pushing it out of the top 30 coins by TVL. This is a significant drop from the $7.7 billion record high set in March 2022. However, the TVL has doubled since early February.

Sonic, FVM Drive Interest in Fantom (FTM)

Investor interest in Fantom is primarily driven by two upcoming upgrades: Sonic and the Fantom Virtual Machine.

The first is a new iteration of the Fantom blockchain that focuses on scaling and replacing the existing Opera network. With Sonic, the network is expected to support over 2,000 transactions per second, enabling it to compete with other popular networks like Solana and Ethereum.

As we prepare for the #Fantom Sonic mainnet, we want to revisit the closed testnet’s incredible performances:

🟦 2,000 TPS (1s TTF) — realistic traffic
🟦 4,000 TPS (1.3s TTF) — ERC-20 swaps
🟦 10,000 TPS (1.6s TTF) — ERC-20 transfers

Learn more here 👇https://t.co/b9nHV238EC pic.twitter.com/5qmBkLyfRB

— Fantom Foundation (@FantomFDN) March 13, 2024

The Sonic testnet has been live since last October, and in that time, it has seamlessly processed an average of 2,044 transactions per second with a time to finality of 0.923 seconds and an average block time of 0.451 seconds. For context, the current mainnet, Opera, processes around three transactions per second, so the new iteration will be a significant leap.

In its Q1 overview of Fantom, Reflexivity Research heaped praise on Fantom, stating:

Fantom Sonic unlocks new possibilities for the Fantom ecosystem, particularly in decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms, blockchain games, high-frequency applications, and the Internet of Things (IoT). The enhanced throughput and efficiency enable smoother operation of DeFi platforms, richer gaming experiences, efficient handling of microtransactions, and secure IoT data exchanges

FVM, on the other hand, is Fantom’s upgrade on the Ethereum Virtual Machine. It is part of the Sonic upgrade and is set to process up to 65x more transactions than the current EVM implementation.