FTM Rockets As Fantom’s Sonic Upgrade Looms

Fantom is mounting an impressive comeback amid anticipation for its Sonic upgrade.

Fantom’s FTM token is up 104% over the past 30 days, having posted a 23-month high of $0.974 on March 16, according to CoinGecko.

FTM’s trade volume also surged more than 1,000% since mid-October, while the total value locked (TVL) in Fantom-based DeFi protocols gained 236% over the same period, according to DeFi Llama.

However, Fantom’s TVL remains down 98.6% from its January 2022 all-time high of nearly $12.4 billion.

FTM’s soaring performance comes as Fantom prepares to launch its upcoming Sonic upgrade, which is scheduled to take place during spring.

Sonic will introduce a new smart contract coding language and execution engine in the Fantom Virtual Machine, which is intended to upgrade from the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) Fantom previously borrowed from Ethereum.

The Fantom Virtual Machine also boasts EVM compatibility, meaning developers can easily port code over from Ethereum.

The Fantom Foundation launched public and closed testnets for Sonic in October 2023, with a March 13 blog post reporting a 95% reduction in transaction costs on the testnet.

The post said Fantom fed the closed testnet with “simulated traffic” mimicking token transfers, asset minting, and multi-step swaps. The Fantom Foundation concluded that the network will be able to support a “realistic” throughput of 2,000 transactions per second (TPS) with one-second finality after Sonic’s mainnet launch.

Other tests suggested the network could process up to 4,000 token swaps and up to 10,000 transfers per second when exclusively processing those transaction types.

Sonic will also target a 90% reduction in storage costs and introduce an upgraded consensus mechanism. The Fantom Foundation added that it has already upgraded multiple archive nodes on mainnet to support Sonic.

Fantom aims to facilitate new DeFi and web3 gaming use cases through Sonic.