Letter to Fantom Foundation team
A few days ago we shared a letter with Fantom Foundation team, as a distributed foundation it can sometimes be difficult to align everyone. Working in isolation or small team silos often makes us create our own vision and mission statements. The letter re-affirms our goals and priorities for 2023, as such, I wanted to share it here as well;
Hi All,
The last few years can be best described as “volatile”. There were blissful highs and dreadful lows. During this time, we have had victories, and we have had losses. At the same time, we have been consistent; consistent in terms of our tech; consistent in terms of our deliverables, and consistent in terms of our growth. Victory comes when we put in the work necessary, and that hasn’t changed. Bull markets are when we are rewarded for the work we put in during the bear market. Those that hunker down, keep building, keep growing, keep improving- they are the ones that reap the rewards of the bull. We were born in a bear market. This is a time we are used to and a time we are well suited for.
Our Mission is to provide the highest throughput blockchain available to provide a single secure settlement layer for all decentralized activity. This is an incredibly hard mission, we aren’t allowed any shortcuts. All decentralized apps should be able to benefit from the same base layer security.
Our Foundation’s role isn’t to choose a business vertical- it’s to enable a base layer that can facilitate all verticals. We shouldn’t be focused on user verticals. Our focus needs to be on developer verticals: improving tooling, integration, ease of use, developer UX, etc. We should not get distracted by the new narratives; defi / nft / gamefi / exchanges / etc
Our overarching objective over the next 12 months will be towards creating an environment for dapp developers to build out sustainable businesses, while differentiating ourselves from other layer 1 solutions.
Our planned core foci are:
Gas monetization — this allows for revenue share for dapps based on gas used — similar to the youtube / twitch creator revenue, this will allow for long term sustainable income for strong dapp teams.
Gas subsidies — allowing for dapp interaction without a wallet needing to pay gas fees itself, smoother onboarding; users don’t need to have or know about FTM.
Account abstraction — we will no longer differentiate between contract and EOA accounts, everything will become a contract. Contracts can initiate transactions and pay for gas. An “EOA” simply becomes an authority allowed to instruct the contract (wallet) to initiate an action. This means an “EOA” can become an email address & password, social auth, face id, etc, further allowing for social recovery and an overall better dapp experience.
Economic abstraction for gas fees — allows fees to be paid in tokens other than FTM, this is dependent on Account Abstraction.
New Middleware (Fantom Virtual Machine, new storage mechanism) — as most are familiar with, this has been our greatest focus. The EVM (i.e smart contract processing) is still our primary bottleneck, and being able to unlock this will allow us to reach towards the physical limitations of hardware.
Performance Engineering — we will keep optimising until we hit the hardware limit of throughput (PebbleDB, flat storage, etc) using the tools that Bernhard’s team and others have been developing.
Documentation & Training — we have focused historically on teams that are already familiar with Solidity. We will be updating our documentation and training towards new builders and non-blockchain native developers.
Our goal is on base layer scaling and making it easier for builders to build easier dapps and onboard users while offering them sustainable (non-token based) business models.
On finances: as has been communicated publicly, we are in a very sustainable and healthy position given the current economic climate, and especially compared to 2018. This is finally one threat to our existence we do not have to be too concerned about.
On funding: we are focusing on providing funding & grant opportunities for dapp teams that can exist without our presence. These are showcased by Gitcoin integration and our ecosystem fund. We can still provide discretionary funding. However any funding we provide needs to focus on potential future revenue for the chain (i.e network transaction fees).
On marketing: we know this has been a difficult area for us historically. We are aggressively pursuing leads and will have good news to put out towards the end of Q1 / start of Q2 2023.
On business development: this has proven challenging given our small team. We are aggressively pursuing leads and will have good news towards the end of Q1 / start of Q2 2023.
On a personal note (from Andre): I have been formally nominated and accepted a position as a member of the Board of Directors for both Fantom Foundation Ltd and Fantom Operations Ltd.
We wish you all a fantastic end of 2022. We are very excited and optimistic about Fantom for 2023. We believe going into 2023 we have the best positioning we have ever had and we fully plan to press our advantage aggressively during this time.
