Analytics Platform Nansen Expands to Fantom, Spotlighting Emerging DeFi Ecosystem

Popular blockchain analytics platform Nansen has expanded coverage to the Fantom blockchain today, shedding light on a rapidly expanding decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem.

The coverage comes at a time when Fantom is becoming a popular DeFi “sidechain” – a non-ETH layer 1 sporting faster settlement times, lower fees and often higher-upside, if riskier, yield farms and investments. The chain accounts for $5 billion in total value locked (TVL), per DeFi Llama.

Nansen is a popular tool among traders and yield farmers, allowing users to analyze and often copy the trading activities of well-known wallets. Nansen currently has support for Ethereum and Polygon, and CoinDesk noted that the newly-released Fantom dashboards seem to feature far fewer “labeled” addresses – a sign that team and community analysts have not cast as thorough a net in identifying individuals and funds on the chain, one of Nansen’s best features.

Fantom is among a growing number of layer 1s competing to attract liquidity and DeFi users with massive incentive programs worth hundreds of millions of dollars in tokens. In Fantom’s case, the Fantom Foundation has committed $314 million in tokens for teams that meet certain TVL thresholds.

Read more: Fantom Commits $314M in FTM to Boost Ecosystem Development

In a statement to CoinDesk, Nansen CEO Alex Svanevik praised Fantom’s effort at solving the “trilemma” – a design theory stating that blockchains can only ever optimize for two of decentralization, scalability and security – while noting that the blockchain’s DeFi ecosystem is already showing promising signs of growth.

“It is still early days in Fantom, with just over 30 protocols on the blockchain,” he wrote, “but I am very excited to see what’s to come.”

In a report accompanying the new coverage, Nansen’s research team found that Fantom is very much a chain on the rise.

Compared to Ethereum, the number of new contract deployments and transactions per day have been ramping up, with both briefly surpassing those on Ethereum at various points in the last month.

Likewise, the chain has significant quantities of stablecoins – key to ensuring liquidity on a chain – primarily composed of USDT. However, the report did note that “in the later part of September, when the crypto market as a whole experienced a decline, stablecoin activity on Fantom similarly followed the down-trend.”

Perhaps most promising, however, is the growing number of sophisticated addresses labeled by Nansen migrating to the chain. Nansen tags certain addresses that managed to achieve various milestones: the “Flash Boys” label, for instance, is given to addresses that have made multiple decentralized exchange trades in a single transaction that have been profitable.

Nansen’s report notes that Fantom is currently highly popular with Flash Boys – likely arbitrage traders taking advantage of volatility and low fees – as well as “Smart LPs,” or highly successful liquidity providers.

The influx of sophisticated ecosystem players could be a sign of growing adoption of the chain, the Nansen report notes.