Fantom is one of main DEFI competitors for Ethereum, with a current Total Value Locked across all dapps of billion, very low fees ( <$$0.1 per tx) and very fast transaction times (seconds).
You currently get around a 4% return for just staking Fantom, or you can use your stake as collateral to mint synths, and as with many DEFI protocols, there are some attractive yields to be had for pairing FTM with other large cap assets such as BTC or stables.
The answer to this question all depends on how it stacks up against the other competitors in this space and ATM they are Terra (Luna) and AVAX (mainly IMO).
I think in terms of what's built on FTM compared to Terra-Luna we can pretty much write LUNA off as just being different - it's 90% about 'UST' with Terra and there aren't many attractive options on offer besides that ATM, while on Fantom there are all the usual DEFI pairings (with wrapped assets) you would expect with Binance Smart Chain and so on.
FTM has MUCH cheaper fees than AVAX - you can transfer, add liquidity and stake any wrapped assets for a few cents on FTM, while you're looking at well over $1 for doing the same on Avalanche - FTM is ATW the only chain besides Polygon that allows you to play around with sums that are <$10 because of its very cheap transaction times.
I also like the staking option - a 4% return or the ability to collateralise for synthetic assets is a nice touch, but TBH I'd be more tempted to pool my FTM on some of the dapps for a higher yield.
There is also the fact that in terms of FTM value to TVL FTM has a mUCH LOWER ratio (0.4) compared to AVAXs ratio of almost 2, suggesting that FTM has a lot more potential for growth.
On the downside, the price of FTM plummeted recently with the announcement of the exit of one its lead developers, raising questions about how decentralised the Fantom Foundation is (we could of course say the same about Hive with Blocktrades).
And the Fantom Foundation has many fewer people working for it compared to AVAX, which has more than double the number.
FTM is also technically less decentralised than AVAX, having only a just over 100 nodes compared to AVAX's 1000.
A final thing to be wary of is FTM's max supply of just over 3.1 Billion is set to be reached by early 2024 - I'm not sure what happens to it then....?
There's a lot of attractive yields on offer on some of the DEFI apps based on Fantom, and especially if you pool with FTM.
I still think there's space for the price of FTM to increase in 2022 given the utility of Fantom (low fees) and the ease of bridging across from other networks.
So for me, FTM is a cautious possible buy.
FTM has been on a downward price trend recently, so it might be worth waiting until it bottoms out and that could be a good time to pick some up.
I'd be cautious about holding significant amounts of it after 2022 however given the uncertainty over the reaching the max supply issue.
