There are over 20,000 blockchain projects in the market as of today. Each aims to gain a good market share and dominance. At the moment, Fantom is among the popular blockchains. Its FTM token is ranked at number 67 by market cap. Today the token is down by 90% from its all-time high of $3.45 on the 28th of October 2021.
At the time of publishing, the FTM token is trading at $0.23, as per CoinGecko. The current crypto bear market has pushed token prices down across the industry. However, this down market and crowded field of competition do not seem to shake the Fantom Foundation CEO’s hope for the future.
Speaking at the Chainlink SmartCon in New York, Fantom Foundation CEO Michael Kong said that he believed competition is good as it encourages better technology. Also, he added that blockchain users are used to using more than one chain, so there might be about 20 to 30 different chains in the future. The remaining chains will have a larger market share.
Fantom got launched in December 2019. It is a layer-1 chain built to offer an alternative to the low speeds and high costs that Ethereum users constantly complained about and were hopeful that the recent Ethereum transition from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake would resolve this problem. It is worth noting that ETH has been down by 300% since this transition.
Fantom CEO Says Ethereum Users Misunderstood the Purpose of Ethereum Merge
Kong thinks that Ethereum users did not understand what the transition would mean. He says many users expected Ethereum merge; to significantly reduce gas fees and increase the blockchain’s throughput. But the Ethereum leadership came out and cleared the air stating that the objective of the merge was only to remove the Proof-of-Work mechanism from the network.
According to Kong, the misconceptions about the merge had more to do with the users’ excitement and less with the Ethereum Foundation’s ways of managing expectations. When asked how Fantom can challenge Ethereum and other blockchains, Kong said their competitive advantage is Fantom’s ability to process transactions asynchronously.
Fantom CEO Believes Regulatory Uncertainty Could Hinder Future Innovations
Kong is concerned by the recent regulatory uncertainty. He says the dispute between the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Securities and Exchange Commission on who is supposed to regulate what is making innovators think twice about blockchain technology.