Fantom: an inside financial peak at being a 'crypto company'
Andre Cronje has emerged from the woodwork to give a behind-the-scenes look into the financial health history of Fantom, here's our reaction to the juicy details
A reaction post to Andre Cronje’s article - Fantom: an inside financial peak at being a 'crypto company'
Andre Cronje has emerged from the woodwork to give a behind-the-scenes look into the financial health history of Fantom. It's a rollercoaster ride of big wins and big losses.
H2 2018
The timeline begins with a $40M treasury, turning into $5M in 5 months due to ETH prices.
May 2019
No team wants to be here, almost a year after the $40M raise, they have less than $2M in non-FTM + $900k in FTM in treasury. This is the inflection point of the journey...a good team would fold, but a great team finds a way out. What does Fantom do?
Feb 2020
Treasury Feb 2020: $3M in non-FTM + $400K in FTM
We're honestly surprised by how well the Fantom team's cost-cutting measures worked. They've been able to at least grow their treasury by almost $1M thanks to profits Time to turn on the risk! FTM 🤝 DeFi
Rest of 2020
The Fantom team starts aggressively yield farming to meet their $8M trading profit goal. With some of the profits from farming on COMP and SNX, Fantom bought back FTM (a move that proved to be lucrative later). By EOY, the treasury is almost back to $40M.
2021
This seemed to be a great growth year for Fantom with increasing revenue and profit from farming activities (seems like they capitalized on DeFi summer):
Treasury Jan 2021: $51M (incl FTM)
Treasury May 2021: $1.5B (incl FTM)
Treasury Sept 2021: $263M (excl FTM)
2022
Bear impacts treasury, but still ends the year with a 30-year runway.
Treasury Nov 2022: 450M FTM, $100M in stables, $100M in crypto, $50M non-crypto
Side note: interesting to see what industry players (exchanges, marketplaces, RPC providers) charge for partnerships.
Today
Fantom seems to be financially healthy:
Earns $10M/yr, excluding capital gains
Cash-flow positive
30-year runway at a $7M salary burn rate
Lessons Andre learned 🧠
Don't compete for integrations, listings, partnerships
Blockchain companies only make money by selling their token, a finite model that does a disservice to the chain and supporters
Without DeFi, Fantom and many others wouldn't be around today
He ends the post with the statement: Crypto is dead. Long live crypto.
How do you interpret that? Comment below
Read the original article from Andre here.
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