AC Open Letter to Foundation: 11 Directions for Fantom in 2023

2022-12-27 15:48

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Letter to Fantom Foundation team

Original article by Andre Cronje

Kate, MarsBit News

We shared a letter with the Fantom Foundation team a few days ago, and as a distributed foundation, it can sometimes be hard to keep everyone on the same page. Working in isolation or in small teams often allows us to create our own vision and mission statement. This letter reaffirms our goals and priorities for 2023, and for that reason, I wanted to share it here as well.

Hello, everyone

The past few years can be described as tumultuous. There are happy highs and terrible lows. During this time, we have had victories and losses. At the same time, we are consistent: our technology is consistent, our deliverables are consistent, our growth is consistent. When we put in the necessary work, the wins come, and that hasn't changed. A bull market is a time when the work we do during a bear market pays off. The people who persevere, who build, who grow, who progress -- they are the ones who reap the rewards of bull markets. We were born in a bear market. It's an era we're used to, and one we're well suited to.

Our mission is to provide the highest throughput blockchain, providing a single secure settlement layer for all decentralized activities. This is a very difficult task and we cannot take short cuts. All decentralized applications should be able to benefit from the same base-layer security.

The role of our foundation is not to select a vertical business -- it is to enable a foundation layer that facilitates all vertical businesses. We should not focus on the user vertical. Our focus needs to be on the developer verticals: improving tools, integration, ease of use, developer user experience, etc. We should not be distracted by the new narrative, Defi, NFT, gamefi, trading platforms, etc.

Our primary goal over the next 12 months is to create an environment for dApp developers to build sustainable businesses while differentiating ourselves from other Tier 1 solutions.

The core focus of our plan is:

Gas monetization - which allows usage-based Gas to provide revenue sharing for dApps - is similar to revenue for youtube/twitch creators and will result in long term sustainable revenue for a strong dApps team.

Gas Subsidy - Allows dApps to interact without the wallet itself paying for Gas, smoother ride, users don't need to own or know FTMS.

Account abstraction - We will no longer distinguish between contract accounts and EOA accounts, everything will be a contract. Contracts can initiate transactions and pay for Gas. An "EOA" is simply an authorization that instructs a contract (wallet) to initiate an action. This means that "EOAs" can become email addresses and passwords, social authentication, face recognition, and so on to further social recovery and an overall better dApp experience.

Economic abstraction of Gas fees - allows fees to be paid using tokens other than FTM, depending on the account abstraction.

New middleware (Fantom virtual machine, new storage mechanism) - as most of you are familiar with, this is our biggest focus. EVM (or smart contract processing) is still a major bottleneck for us, and being able to solve this will allow us to reach the physical limits of our hardware.

Performance Engineering - We will optimize until we reach hardware throughput limits (PebbleDB, flat storage, etc.) using tools developed by Bernhard's team and others.

Documentation and training - We've been focusing on teams that are already familiar with Solidity. We will update our documentation and training for new builders and non-blockchain native developers.

我们的目标是基础层扩展，让构建者更容易构建更简单的 dApps 和激活用户，同时为他们提供可持续的（非基于 Token 的）商业模式。

On the financial side: As publicly communicated, we are in a very sustainable and healthy position given the current economic environment, especially compared to 2018. This is the last threat to our existence, and we need not worry too much about it.

About funding: We focus on funding and funding opportunities for dApp teams that can survive without us. These are showcased by Gitcoin Integration and our Ecosystem Fund. We can still provide discretionary funds. However, any funding we provide needs to focus on the chain's potential future revenue (i.e. network transaction fees).

On marketing: We know that this has historically been a difficult area for us. We are actively looking for potential customers and will have good news to report in late 1Q/early 2Q 2023.

On business growth: This has proved challenging for our small team. We are actively pursuing leads and will have good news by the end of 1Q/early 2Q 2023.

On a personal note (from Andre) : I have been formally nominated and accepted as a member of the Board of Directors of Fantom Foundation Ltd and Fantom Operations Ltd.

I wish you all a happy ending to 2022. We are very excited and optimistic about Fantom 2023. We believe we are best positioned going into 2023 than we have ever been, and we fully plan to aggressively play to our strengths during this period.