As a dark horse in the previous bull market, the public chain Fantom has been making continuous moves in this round of bull market. On May 23rd, Fantom updated its brand upgrade plan Sonic. The Fantom Foundation announced that the community has voted in favor of its first proposal for the upcoming Sonic chain. The proposal stated that Sonic will launch a new token $S, which will be exchanged at a 1:1 ratio with FTM upon release. In addition, Fantom will establish a new Sonic Foundation and has completed a $10 million financing for the foundation. Perhaps in order to complement the launch of the Sonic chain, Fantom announced a MEME competition plan on May 21st, offering a prize pool of 10 million FTM. With Fantom’s recent frequent activities, will the combination of token swap and MEME be able to activate the highly anticipated Sonic chain?
Chain recovery, entering the MEME game
After witnessing the success of Solana and Base in creating on-chain activities through MEME, Fantom also launched a MEME season. On May 21st, the Fantom Foundation launched the Meme Season Competition with a prize pool of 10 million FTM, equivalent to approximately $8 million based on the price of FTM at around $0.8.
According to official information, this competition aims to focus on top memecoins on Opera and the upcoming Sonic chain. As an important strategic measure to complement the Sonic upgrade, the competition will be held in multiple rounds, with the first round taking place from June 1st to June 30th, with a prize pool of 1 million sFTMx (FTM staked through Beethoven X for liquidity).
The evaluation criteria for the competition are determined by a combination of market value, gas usage, and trading volume, with market value accounting for 50% of the score, gas fees accounting for 35%, and trading volume accounting for 15%. It is worth noting that the trading volume on other networks outside of centralized exchanges or Opera will not be counted in this competition. At the end of each round, the top 3 memecoins will be the winners.
In each round, 80% of the prize pool will be awarded to the holders of the top 3 winning memecoin projects, weighted based on their holdings. The remaining 20% will be allocated to the teams behind these 3 memecoins. The prize distribution for the first round is as follows:
Winner 1 = 600k sFTMx (480k for holders, 120k for the team)
Winner 2 = 300k sFTMx (240k for holders, 60k for the team)
Winner 3 = 100k sFTMx (80k for holders, 20k for the team)
However, Fantom did not specify that the MEME projects participating in the competition must be newly issued tokens during the competition phase. Therefore, several existing MEME coins on Fantom may have an advantage. And since there are only 3 winning spots in each round, the limited opportunities may hinder the motivation of new projects.
MEME hype has not been activated yet
Perhaps to facilitate widespread user participation, the Fantom Foundation also recommended 4 one-click token issuance platforms on Twitter: Degen Express, Super Pump, fTails, Bedrock Finance. Based on PANews’ research, these platforms are similar to the one-click token issuance platform Pump.fun that recently gained popularity on Solana, but they differ greatly in activity. Degen Express has a relatively high level of activity, but the highest market value token is only around $27,000. The other platforms are very inactive. Super Pump has a total of 11 MEME coins issued (data from May 26th), all of which are not being traded and have a market value of 0.
As of May 26th, it seems that the effect of this MEME competition has not yet been fully displayed. The newly listed Fantom trading pairs in the past 24 hours on May 26th were only 20, compared to 1252 on Solana and 2088 on Base. The highest number of transactions for new listings on Fantom is only 24. Perhaps with the official start of the MEME season on June 1st, the changes in these data will better reflect the effect.
Token swap is possible, but community is skeptical of increasing supply
In addition to launching the MEME competition to generate excitement for the Sonic chain, Fantom also introduced a new token $S to complete its brand upgrade. The proposal for the Sonic Network provides a detailed description of the governance plan for the new token $S. The proposal suggests that when the Sonic chain is launched, the supply of $S will be matched with the supply of $FTM to achieve a seamless migration process at a 1:1 ratio. In terms of the possible governance plans for the future $S token, Proposal 2 and Proposal 3 suggest minting additional $S tokens for operation, airdrops, and incentivizing ecosystem projects.
As of now, the specific details of Proposal 2 and Proposal 3 have not been officially announced, but many community members have expressed doubts about these two proposals. User Paintball l26 commented, “Do Proposal 2 and Proposal 3 have any specific numbers? I strongly oppose a blank check with an unknown dilution factor, allocating hundreds of millions of FTM and then asking for further dilution.” Another user STACHE stated, “I don’t think Proposal 2 or Proposal 3 is necessary. I dare say that 5-10% of FTM will be unable to migrate due to loss, burned LP, and other reasons. If the initial supply is the same, then 5-10% is definitely enough to cover Proposal 2 and Proposal 3, right? Many people’s biggest concern is further dilution.”
Overall, the Sonic upgrade is the most important narrative for Fantom, starting from the performance narrative surrounding Sonic and the parallel EVM introduction and the processing speed of 2000 TPS in March, to the current MEME season and new token plans, which all demonstrate Fantom’s determination for revival. However, so far, there seems to be no significant market response to the FTM token due to these narratives (the current price is hovering around $0.8, similar to the price before the release of Sonic in March). The new Sonic chain will further enhance Fantom’s performance and brand influence, but the real on-chain activity and a more reasonable token economic model may be the more effective attractions, and these are currently in the stage of being verified.
