What is FTM?
FTM is the token used by Fantom. Fantom is a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-based smart
contract platform. It promises to solve scalability problems inherent in Blockchain technologies, as well as provide a platform for decentralized applications (dapps). There are a lot of other cool things it can do, but I just learned about it yesterday, so rather than try and describe it, here are some links that do it much better:
- Great explainer video from Coin Bureau: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHGspHhbzYQ
- Whitepaper: https://fantom.foundation/research/wp_fantom_v1.6.pdf
- Overview: https://docs.fantom.foundation/technology/overview
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/FantomFDN
- Discord: https://discord.com/invite/6V42Gs8/
- Wallet: https://fantom.foundation/ftm-wallet/
- DAG vs Blockchain: https://medium.com/@kotsbtechcdac/dag-will-overcome-blockchain-problems-dag-vs-blockchain-9ca302651122
I found out about it through Andre Cronje. He’s the man behind yearn.finance, among other things. And I have him on my DeFi list on Twitter. He’s also part of the Fantom team. He tweeted about what you can do on FTM. I wanted to find out more so I dug deeper. I also saw a video that FTM is starting to go parabolic and I wanted in on it. Here’s how to get some…
The easy way…
- Go to https://fantom.foundation/where-to-buy-ftm/ and use one of the choices there, like Binance.
The hard way…
If you’re like me and you don’t have a Binance account and don’t want to create one, but you have Coinbase and MetaMask, you can use 1inch to make the swap:
- Go to pro.coinbase.com.
- Buy Etherium.
- Transfer it to your MetaMask wallet.
- Go to 1inch and connect your wallet
- go to FTM/ETH swap and fill out the info.
- Be sure you have enough gas. One way to lower the gas cost is to open settings to adjust.
- In settings, enter a custom slippage tolerance of 5% and chose 128 standard gas price.
- Exit settings.
- Adjust the amount of ETH willing to send, if you don’t have enough in your wallet to buy and pay the gas price. If you have a ton of ETH in your wallet you shouldn’t have any problems.
- Choose the lowest gas cost.
- Click Swap Token. You should be able to move forward if you have enough funds.
- Confirm the swap on the modal that pops up. If you can’t swap for any reason, you’ll see an error. Correct the error until you can confirm on 1inch.
- Confirm the swap on MetaMask.
- Follow the transaction on Etherscan. It only took a few minutes for me.
- Profit!
You can connect your wallet to https://zapper.fi to keep track of the total value of your staked money and the money in your wallet.
I realize that by holding FTM, I’m missing the point of DeFi and staking. I’ll address that in another post. I did stake some USDC on https://staked.us/. I’m still in the DeFi 0.0 stage of buying and holding coins instead of than staking them. To be continued…
My DeFi journey 