The Fantom blockchain’s native FTM token has seen a strong rally in the market over the past week, with the move accelerating further over the past 24 hours – as the price closes in on the key USD 3 mark for the first time since November.
At 14:32 UTC on Tuesday, FTM stood at USD 2.96, up nearly 15% over the past 24 hours and nearly 35% over the past 7 days.
The moves follow a sharp reversal from an overall bearish to bullish trend around December 20, which has brought the price from USD 1.3 that day, to a daily high close to USD 3 today – a gain of more than 120%.
FTM’s all-time high is USD 3.48, reached on October 28 last year.
90-day price of FTM:
The recently strong price gains come as activity on the Fantom network is also picking up.
According to data from DeFi Llama, the total value locked (TVL) on the blockchain platform reached a new all-time high on Tuesday, with a total of USD 5.86bn now deployed across decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols on Fantom.
Fantom total value locked (TVL):
The current TVL on Fantom means that it is now one of the leading blockchain platforms by TVL, just ahead of Tron (TRX) with a TVL of USD 5.26bn, but still well behind Solana (SOL) with its USD 11.55bn.
Further, data from the Fantom blockchain explorer FTMScan today showed that the number of unique addresses on the blockchain has grown steadily throughout the second half of 2021. As of January 3, the network had 1.53m unique addresses, with 12,261 new addresses being added that day alone.
Fantom and other blockchains with smart contract functionality have received more attention over the past year as high transaction fees have made the base layer of the Ethereum (ETH) network prohibitively expensive for some DeFi activities.
If second-layer solutions for Ethereum do not gain the necessary traction, “steep transaction costs will increase activity on alternate [Layer 1 blockchains] such as Solana, Avalanche, Fantom, and Polygon,” a report from crypto research firm Delphi Digital warned back in November.
Source: Cryptonews
