I’ve been interested by the Fantom blockchain lately, and that’s not without reason. First of all, Fantom aims for near-zero transaction fees and they are not lying. Transaction fees are literally pennies. At the same time, they do not sacrifice scalability and transaction speed. (i.e. Polygon is cheap, but it is slow and the network can be down at times.)

But it’s more than that. To me, the success of a blockchain depends on its community — the culture. That consists of not only the users but also developers. And in this matter, Fantom looks to be on the right track. First, the network has been experiencing a significant increase in TVL. A sign of increasing adoption.

Secondly, Fantom also attracted a good number of legit dApps. It’s easy to port an Ethereum dApp to Fantom, as it is Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible. Developers don’t have to learn new stuff to be able to deploy a project here.

The result? Plenty of cool projects onboarded onto Fantom at a quick pace.

We saw some good old Ethereum blue-chip names like Yearn, Curve, and Sushi. Let me tell you that many ETH devs are kinda picky and rather maxi. They don’t want to just deploy on any chain. The fact that they are okay with Fantom, shows a certain amount of trust toward the blockchain.

At the same time, there are DeFi 2.0 projects like Abracadabra — originated as Ethereum project — and Fantom’s native dApps like Scream (which developer also works on another ETH dapp.)

Scream Finance

There’s been an interesting development lately with the protocol: new products and collaborations have happened.

Scream is a lending and borrowing protocol. Lately, I’ve been liking how much their APY is on stablecoins. They are a good choice for more conservative investors.

After supplying USDC, for example, you’ll have the option to borrow up to 80% of the amount of your collateral. Both lending and borrowing entitle you to $SCREAM rewards.

Recently they collaborated with Abracadabra money to accommodate the stablecoin $MIM lending and borrowing pool. APY is still among the highest currently.

Meanwhile, you can stake the $SCREAM rewards and further earn around 60% APY.

Another collaboration Scream made is with Yearn Finance.

Yearn Beta

Yearn is coming into Fantom.

What does that mean? Yearn will deposit your WFTM to Scream. You’ll earn $SCREAM rewards. Yearn will swap those $SCREAM with more $WFTM and invest it back to your Scream pool.

Notice that Scream uses APY instead of APR. That means it takes compounding into account when counting the yield. For users, they have to periodically re-invest their rewards to maximize the return.

Don’t bother? Yearn will do that for you with its $WFTM vault. You can skip Scream entirely.

The app is in beta, by the way. So, know what you’re into.

When you deposit something on Yearn, you get Ytoken on your wallets. In the case of WFTM, it’s yvWFTM. Look at it as a contract that earns you rights to withdraw your WFTM — plus interests — from Yearn vaults that you have deposited earlier. And guess what? You can further get investment opportunities — a.k.a make dem sweet money — with your yvWFTM.

Enter Abracadabra.

Abracadabra

Abracadabra Money allows you the opportunity to further make your crypto tokens work for you. Capital efficiency for the win.

On Abracadabra, you can deposit interest-bearing tokens. Interest bearing tokens are the likes of yToken I wrote above. A smart contract token that already generates interests on its own. Another example is xSushi, the token you will get for staking $SUSHI and earning yields on SushiSwap.

So, what happens after you deposit interest-bearing tokens on Abracadabra?

You can borrow $MIM. $MIM is a stablecoin of Abracadabra that’s backed by these interest-bearing tokens users deposited. One MIM equals 1 USD.

As you can see in the picture above, you can also borrow MIM by putting wFTM, not just yvWFTM. But there’s just not much MIM to borrow. I’ve been checking lately and it’s always sold out. There’s indeed a lot of demand for MIM.

You can also change leverage but only if you know what you’re doing.

What can you do with the MIMs you borrow? Well, up to you. Stake it on this Abracadabra’s pool and generate yields in form of $SPELL, the protocol token of Abracadabra. Lend it to Scream’s pools and earn interest. Or, swap MIM for other stables on Curve and buy more crypto you are bullish on. A lot of possibilities for money lego-ing.

(Additionally, you can stake SPELL and earns money from the interest fee people pay when borrowing. However, this feature is currently on Ethereum only)

What I like about Fantom is how developers across many protocols are instant — or already — BFFs. It’s not like this kind of collaboration is not happening with Ethereum. But it’s worth noticing how fast they quickly collaborate with each other on Fantom, as we have seen in those three DeFi protocols above.

This is a good thing for Fantom in many ways.

1. Cooperation is better than competition. At this stage, since Fantom is at an early stage, it can get stronger more with collaborations than competitions.
2. Shows organic developers ecosystem. Not VC-encouraged like we’ve seen in other chains.
3. Fantom’s projects are few, but high-quality because of collaborations between developers from already established projects in other chains, especially Ethereum. Less chance of rugpulls and scam projects. It’s also easier to notice them.
4. Simply there will be more cool projects and collabs ahead, thriving Fantom as a network.