Lately, I became really fed up of gas fees on the Ethereum blockchain. As you have seen, I have been playing around on the Terra blockchain for that reason. Recently, I have been really impressed by Fantom Opera!
So here is my overall guide on Fantom: What is Fantom Opera, how to join Fantom’s ecosystem, why joining it, the best places to generate nice interest rates and some cool NFT rpg dungeon and dragons inspired game, Rarity Manifested, by Andre Cronje.
What is Fantom (FTM)?
If you lived in a cave, you probably only heard of Fantom for their partnerships with Afghanistan regarding counterfeit drugs (not sure this project is of peculiar interest to the new Afghan leaders) or for their partnership with Orienbank to develop a possible CBDC for Tajikistan.
But Fantom Opera is actually a very interesting project. It’s not a blockchain, it’s a DAG (directed acyclic graph). Supposedly, Fantom Opera can solve the blockchain trilemma (Decentralized, Scalable, and Secure) because it’s not a blockchain!
Here is a very cool interview of Michael Chen, former Chief Marketing Officer of Fantom, (probably too long in our nowadays 5 min attention span). Here is an alternative shorter video:
How to Join Fantom: the Cheapest and Easiest Way
First of all, there is a really good centralized source of info, directly from the Fantom foundation! Most of your questions/processes are described there. In this subsection I will just present you what is for me the best and cheapest way to join the Fantom ecosystem.
Buy FTM – Send to MetaMask – Add Fantom on MetaMask – bridge FTM
Well, it’s simple. Buy FTM, send it to your MetaMask address and then bridge it to FTM ecosystem.
- Buy FTM
Just buy FTM from your favorite exchange. I highly recommend FTX, I’ve seen too many times binance blocking FTM withdrawals. Binance is doing too many shenanigans.
- Send to MetaMask
Withdraw your FTM to your ETH MetaMask address.
I haven’t checked yet how to connect your ledger of trezor to MetaMask. However, I assume it’s possible as, just like the binance smart chain, Fantom network is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine. On this page, there is a tutorial to connect MetaMask to your ledger for the Fantom Network. Be careful, again, I haven’t tested it. I’m still looking around for a trezor tutorial, but I can’t find one. Guess I will have to do one later! Otherwise, see my advices on how to safely use MetaMask. - Add Fantom to your MetaMask networks
See how to do it here: https://docs.Fantom.foundation/tutorials/set-up-metamask - Bridge to FTM
Just go on spookyswap! It’s the uniswap of Fantom. It’s powered by Anyswap. The bridging is FREE! However, for the bridging in the other direction (to go from Fantom network to ethreum network), there is a fee of around $40. It does not bother me yet, as I haven’t removed any fund from Fantom yet.
Et voilà! You should see your FTM balance in your MetaMask, on the FTM network.
Please, use this route. There is no easy faucet available if you happen to bridge only USDC to your MetaMask Fantom network. Once you have FTM on your wallet, always keep a non-zero amount ($1-2 dollars is enough!) of FTM in your wallet, or you will have troubles later (just like you now need $100-200 in your eth wallets to do anything…).
Why joining Fantom?
There can be multiple reason to join the Fantom network. I’m a simple man, trying to generate passive income. Fantom network is booming and you can find some really interesting interest rates in its DeFi that are not killed by the crazy gas fees that you need to spend to interact with them.
What’s the point of ETH DeFi if you need to spend $60 bucks entering a pool, $60 exiting it, and you just earn $20 per day. You need one week to be profitable…
Fantom’s Ecosystem
Fantom ecosystem is now even too big for me to fully grasp it. I start now to not even understand some of its application. Believe me, this a good sign.
Here are the most useful ones for me right now:
Spookyswap
SpookySwap (BOO) is the Uniswap of Fantom. It’s a decentralized exchange (DEX), with the largest transaction volume. You can swap but also place order limits on it unlike in uniswap!
Scream
Scream (SCREAM) is the AAVE/compound of Fantom: a decentralized lending application. It provides users with a decentralized, transparent and non-custodial peer-to-peer lending solution.
Beefy
Beefy Finance (BIFI) provides automated investment strategies like Yearn, enabling maximizing the user benefits from various liquidity pools, automatic marker making and other farming projects.
Artion.io
Artion has just launched. It’s the opensea alternative on Fantom. Opensea are crooks, not surprised aren’t you? Later, Artion will be a marketplace supporting multiple chains and with built in cross chain NFT transfer capability, while being open source. Opensea est mort, vive Artion.
Personal strategies on Fantom
So right now, I’ve been playing quite a bit on the Fantom ecosystem:
- If like me you believe that Fantom will boom, you can expose yourself by buying some FTM, of course, but also BOO and SCREAM.
- I currently provide liquidity for both SCREAM and FTM on spookyswap, and use my SCREAM-FTM LP in beefy, for a daily 0.52% interest rate, or 563% apy!
- I also have some USDC on beefy at 21.3% apy. Again, don’t use USDT!
- If you don’t trust scream or beefy, and only want to expose yourself to spokyswap, you can stake BOO on spookyswap to earn 35.3% apr in BOO. You can use your xBOO receipt to stake earn 51.88% scream on spookyswap!
Newsletter
Guide to Rarity Manifested: a dungeon & dragon inspired old school like RPG by Andre Cronje
This will probably become a full fledged article later, once I will have more content to share. But we are at the infancy of this project.
Andre Cronje (the legendary Yearn finance creator) just created a dungeon and dragon inspired NFT (Non-Fungible Token) crypto game. He was inspired by the loot project, and decided to create a crypto game with his ideas as game economies.
You can find on his medium, the different posts on his progress on this side project.
Why playing Rarity Manifested?
I haven’t been this excited by an NFT crypto game since Sorare! There are 3 good reasons to play Rarity:
- It’s free to play, and as it is on Fantom ecosystem, no crazy gas fees. With something like 10 FTM, you will be able to pay for the network fees for several months. Maybe later you will even be able to earn some money (see below for already some NFT numbers craziness).
- You can learn to interact with the smart contracts directly. It’s a good opportunity to learn this set of skills, if you have never taken the time to do it.
- It’s a community project! Not fake community with some random airdrop/DAO! People are building things in, for and into the project (as you will see later)!
Smart Contract Interaction
As stated above, you can do everything you want by directly interacting with the contracts on ftmscan. Have a look to learn how to do it. Here is for example a good video to explain you how to summon your first character, assign stats, have adventures and craft items all by interacting with Rarity Manifested smart contracts.
UI
The community has built several great UI if you don’t want to directly use the smart contracts. I actually use https://Rarity.game/. Have a look at the other UI built by the community, and you might find an alternative that better suits you. Like other UI, with this one you can do everything from summoning, setting stats and skills, crafting etc.
A recent cool addition is the opportunity to buy some starter packs (each pack contains a level 2 summoner of each class, 11.000 gold, 6 items, 300 mats and an NFT badge.)
Here is the list of the greatest UI that I’ve seen:
- https://Rarity.game/ by @RarityGame
- https://rarityextended.com/ by @RXtended
- http://rarityvisualizer.com by @txxnano
- https://raritymmo.com/ by @SteveInCrypto
- http://RarityManifested.com by @YieldBouncer
Marketplace
https://summoner-market.alphafinance.io
Great place to sell your NFTs: summoners, weapons, armors, goods and probably more to come.
Made by @nomorebear, @nipun_pit and @jade_arin.
Stats
https://cryptomarkettoday.com/Rarity
To see the stats around the different summoners already sold. As you can see, one summoner was already sold for 6000 FTM! The first 1k summoners that were sold, were for 1600 FTM in average! There is some demand for this game!
Made by @Hotbinaryoption
Guide
An impressive guide by Juffu, for anyone to understand how to best pick stats, feats and so forth when you are not familiar about dungeon & dragon.
Youtuber
Perfect to understand the basics of the game (from the dungeon and dragon side to crafting). You can also follow him on his twitter: ArtOfSpeculation.
Most important by far:
You can also follow the different devs:
@0xAdventure, @nomorebear, @nipun_pit, @jade_arin, @Hotbinaryoption, @RarityGame,, @RXtended, @txxnano, @SteveInCrypto, @YieldBouncer
Claiming
If your summoner is level2+, you can claim 100 RAR! The purpose of RAR is to reward early Rarity Manifested players. Maybe later, RAR will be useful to the game economy.
Best Resource
As stated above, it’s a community project, with lots of different devs implanting their terrific ideas. Unfortunately, I can’t keep track of all of them. Hopefully, a fellow blogger (et camarade apparemment) is keeping quite a large list of ongoing projects. Props to him!
Conclusion
As you can see it’s not straightforward, as most things in DeFi, but Fantom is very cheap and booming. It’s already possible to generate some impressive passive income while playing fun NFT game like Rarity Manifested!
The whole scheme has lots of risks. How safe is Fantom, spookyswap, beefy, scream? No idea. Contracts seem to not have not been as much battle tested as their equivalent on eth network, and it’s perfectly normal. That’s why I only use a very small part of my bankroll.
Let me know if something is not clear, or if you have found better bridging way. Also, if you have tips and tricks on Rarity, don’t hesitate to leave a comment!
Support me
In case you liked my take on Fantom and Rarity and learnt interesting things, or if you want to support me, please feel free to send me a coffee over.
