Opera Mainnet: A New Act in Blockchain
Opera Mainnet (Fantom) is a permission-free, open-source framework that allows everyone to participate in the network through mining and management.
What is Opera Mainnet (Fantom)?
Opera Mainnet is one of the newest functional blockchains. The blockchain was created in December 2019. Opera is a permission-free, open-source structure that allows everyone to participate in the network through mining and management.
Fantom’s native token is FTM, which is used to mine, manage and pay for platform services. Fantom uses Lachesis, which combines Proof-of-Stake and Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance (aBFT) consensus mechanisms for faster and cheaper transactions, and provides a secure environment.
What sets Fantom apart from the competition?
First- and second-generation blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum were not designed to scale. Their main problems were security and decentralisation. As a result, the speed of transactions on the network became slow, especially as new nodes were added. Transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain network can take up to 15 minutes; on the Fantom network, transactions can be completed in seconds. Fantom uses the unique Lachesis system to solve the ‘blockchain trilemma’ – the balance between speed, security and decentralisation.
Even if there are broken or malicious nodes in the network, the BFT method allows consensus to be achieved. Theoretically, it can manage up to one-third of broken or malicious nodes without causing the network to shut down. As a result, nodes reach consensus on their own with a two-step block validation procedure if they receive two-thirds of the votes. This eliminates the need for the leader node to create blocks, allowing for faster transactions while maintaining security.
The Fantom network is more decentralised because the blocks in it are autonomous. Each decentralised application runs on its own blockchain, which is linked to the Lachesis system.
What is a Fantom virtual machine?
The Fantom virtual machine is used in Mainnet Opera. It is a Fantom development system that provides tools for creating and deploying decentralised financial applications (dApps).
The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is also supported in Opera. It allows developers to effortlessly port their decentralised Ethereum-based applications to the Fantom network. This ensures compatibility with the world’s largest smart contracts platform.
What is Lachesis?
Fantom uses its own Lachesis consensus technique instead of copying the proof-of-work (PoW) processes used in Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Lachesis is known for its asynchronous consensus mechanism aBFT. The creators of Fantom claim that they have managed to find a solution to the long-standing problem of blockchain scaling and do so without sacrificing other important features – decentralisation and security. One of the main advantages of Lachesis over Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerant (pBFT) consensus systems is its resistance to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
aBFT also uses Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) technology, which is common in other emerging blockchain consensus systems. Each node in the network stores a local DAG, which is subsequently used to calculate the final order of events. Unlike previous blockchain systems, transaction events are compared to other nodes in the network rather than to the blocks themselves.
Fantom architecture
The Fantom architecture consists of three layers:
- Opera Core
- Opera Ware
- Application Layer
We can examine the Fantom architecture using a hamburger as an example. The bottom bun in the Lachesis protocol is Opera Core, which is responsible for maintaining consensus between nodes. Each transaction is stored on each node, but Fantom is unusual in that it requires a second type of node, called a witness node, to validate transactions, and uses dPOS techniques to select validating nodes. In addition, users must have at least 1,000,000 FTMs to operate the validator.
Opera Ware is the ‘meat’ of the protocol, allowing it to perform tasks such as issuing rewards and creating ‘Story Data’.
Sesame Seed Bun is an Opera app, it has public APIs that allow developers to connect to the Opera Ware layer through their dApps. The app evolving from it is ‘Story Data’, which is a fundamental feature for storing unlimited and extensive data records needed for applications such as supply chain management.
