Fantom Completes Go-Opera Network Update

According to Fantom’s blog post, the Go-Opera upgrade, which will radically improve the network’s performance and reliability, began rolling out last week. The upgrade was also much more complicated to implement when compared to the previous Go-Lachesis, as it required the complete rewriting and optimization of some parts of the codebase.

With the upgrade now complete, the average time-to-finality (TTF) will be around 1 second, with P2P synchronization becoming 3 times faster. The emission of events will become more efficient — even in the case of non-ideal network conditions, such as slow data propagation between nodes — as Go-Opera will generate roughly 2 times fewer events per frame.

All of the blockchain history up to the point of the migration will be squished into a Genesis file around 700 MB in size. This means that node operators will need to download only the genesis file to set up a new node after the migration and won’t need to process any previous events. 

The company also said it has updated the Special Fee Contract (SFC) to its third version. SCFv3 will have a simpler interface when compared to SCFv2 and will allow broader changes to SFC rules in the future without requiring a node upgrade. Delegators will be able to claim all the rewards at once and there will be no restriction on when a user has to claim rewards. 

The launch of Go-Opera follows a $15 million investment into Fantom. HyperChain Capital, a digital asset management company focused on blockchain projects, acquired an additional stake in the Fantom ecosystem through the purchase of FTM. The additional backing follows an initial investment of $2.5 million the company made in 2018. 

Earlier this year, Alameda Research, the company behind the FTX exchange, invested $35 million in the Fantom ecosystem. The company’s blockchain data indexing protocol The Graph launched on Fantom at the same time.