The Fantom Foundation confirmed reducing the validator self-staking requirement by 90% six months after the governance vote. The Fantom Foundation communicated the changes aiming to bolster the Fantom’s security without compromising the network speed.
Fantom Foundation announced the changes in the Monday, January 15 post on the X platform, indicating the 90% reduction of staking requirement target layer-1 blockchain Fantom following the June 2023 vote.
Fantom Announces Lower Staking Requirements and Additional Validators in Network
The adjustment conveyed by Fantom lowers the staking threshold from the usual 500,000 FTM down to 50,000 FTM, valued at $19,500. The Foundation attributed the changes to the need to strengthen Fantom’s security and facilitate its accessibility to run a validator.
The Foundation disclosed via the January 15 post that having more validators will make the network increasingly difficult for the malicious to launch successful attacks.
Fantom validators operate uniquely by bundling up transactions before sharing them with other validators. Finality is realized whenever two-thirds of the validators within the network reach a consensus.
The Fondation observed that increasing validators would speed up the process of submitted transactions reaching their destination as one would have a large number to choose from. Nonetheless, the Foundation indicated the potential concern that an uptick in validator numbers would not translate toward slowing the Fantom network.
The Foundation indicated that provided the new validators are running on quality hardware, the network will not suffer security issues. Also, the network would not exhibit downgraded performance and will likely maintain the 1-2 seconds to finality.
Fantom emphasized that reducing the staking requirements would not pose security risks. Guaranteed security is possible since the validator’s power is proportional to the staking amount and not the number of runs.
Fantom explained that a validator handling 1 million FTM would realize similar power as 20 smaller validators, each handling 50K FTM staked.
Review of Fantom Security
Fantom admitted to lowering the minimum FTM amount requirements from February 2022. A review of the data by Fantom’s block explorer shows that it taps 58 validators in securing the network.
Fantom network has the least number of validators compared to Ethereum, whose layer-1 smart contract platform leverages 1.1 million. By June 2023, Cardano utilized 2,589 validators, while Solana and Avalanche hosted 1,876 and 1,119 validators in their network, as per the Messari data.
Fantom Foundations admitted that a hot wallet suffered a $550,000 exploit. The lost funds were downplayed by the firm as accounting for less than 1% of the Foundation’s funds.
The blockchain firm indicated that it awarded $1.7 million to the security researcher for successfully identifying vulnerability to additional risk following the hack. The researcher’s quick action facilitated the firm in averting the vulnerability with an estimated potential of $170 million in damage.
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