Fantom brushes off network outage with another 50% price surge

The decentralized smart contract platform Fantom (FTM) continued its resurgent rally to the tune of 50% on Monday, despite a temporary network outage that saw the blockchain stop producing blocks for seven hours.

Fantom emerged among the top 100 in the market capitalization rankings in January — eventually going on a 5,000% run that peaked in late February. Since then, the coin’s bull run subsided, but its value against the U.S. dollar still stands 3,434% higher than it did on Jan. 1.

But Fantom was subject to a brief blackout on Feb. 25 when block production was halted after two validators slowed down the rate of emissions. Fantom is a proof-of-stake blockchain where 39 validator nodes oversee block creation on behalf of stakers. The two validators in question represented one-third of the FTM staked on the platform.

The development team successfully coordinated and applied a temporary patch that got the network up and running again seven hours later. A recent announcement by Fantom stated:

“On Thursday, February 25 2021 at 3.04 PM UTC, Fantom Opera mainnet halted new block confirmations, which resulted in a temporary outage. The core developer team and Fantom validator community immediately responded and successfully resumed the network within 7 hours.”

The fix required the consensus of 39 validators in multiple time zones, and the development team noted that no staked funds were at risk during the outage.

In response to the incident, the development team decided to address the imbalance of power among validators and will attempt to distribute influence more evenly among nodes. To achieve this aim, the amount of FTM required to set up a validator node will be reduced from its current prohibitive figure of 3,175,000 FTM.

In January, this equated to a dollar value of just over $30,000. Now, following Fantom’s recent surge, that figure stands over $1.8 million.

Fantom’s recent surge has been attributed to developments made in the realm of interoperability and decentralized finance. The project was recently integrated into Multichain — a decentralized token swap protocol that bridges disparate blockchains such as Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain and enables token swaps without any intermediary.

On Monday morning, Fantom’s ascension continued, as the coin price climbed from $0.3827 to $0.58, equating to 54% growth by the time of publication.