Scaling crypto payments with the Fantom Foundation

Problem

The process was manual, involving extreme dedication to honing Excel superpowers and enduring manual payout processes. Paying PDF invoices in crypto involved a lot of time and elbow grease, with payouts having to be done one at a time, copying payment details like wallet addresses from a spreadsheet. 

Bookkeeping in crypto was similarly tedious, involving manual conversion of prices on the invoice according to prevailing exchange rates in fiat and crypto, and painstakingly updating these records on an Excel sheet regularly.

Solution

Request Finance allowed Fantom Foundation to automatically collect data for their financial records, display all their invoices in one place, and automatically price different crypto payments in fiat currencies. 

Most of the team uses Request Finance to process payments like grants, or invoices from contractors, and team members.

Hundreds of hours saved

Request Finance provided Fantom Foundation with a simple and efficient solution to save hundreds of hours per year to focus on other parts of the business and provide a great experience for their community paying in crypto on Fantom. 

Like most solutions to problems today - we first learned about Request Finance on the internet. A few of our team members at the time had heard of, and already used the app, and highly recommended it.

Intuitive, easy to use

What stood out to them the most was the ease-of-use, and time saved by using Request Finance to manage and automate their crypto payments. 

The ease of doing crypto payments in Request Finance is probably the feature the team find the most valuable. It’s incredibly easy to use for both the business and external users that send us invoices in crypto. 

The app is very intuitive, and sometimes it takes a while for the interface to update the status of the invoice, but this usually resolves pretty quickly. It’s certainly faster and simpler than having to check a blockchain explorer.

“Request Finance has been fantastic for Fantom Foundation. We have been using the app extensively for over a year and the new expenses feature simplifies our internal processes even further. Since we started using Request Finance we’ve been able to save hundreds of hours per year to focus on other parts of the business, and provide a great experience for our community paying in crypto on Fantom.

Michael Kong, CEO of Fantom Foundation

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About Fantom Foundation

The global economy processes a staggering amount of transactions daily. As payments increasingly go digital, payment rails need to keep up. In just India alone, users made an average of over 284 million digital payments per day as of 2022. Data collected by Statista suggests that major card payment networks processed an estimated 1.6 billion transactions per day, globally in 2021. 

While blockchain-based money holds the promise of universal, fast and cheap settlements, one of the major barriers to crypto adoption is scalability. Since 2017, there has been an endless race to develop various solutions to help blockchains grow their network processing volumes at minimal cost.

One approach is to design blockchains with better consensus mechanisms. Fantom is a Layer-1 blockchain with its own unique consensus mechanism that can process multiple transactions simultaneously, to support the hundreds of applications built on top of the network. While other Layer-1 chains like Bitcoin and Ethereum process blocks (groups of transactions) one at a time, Fantom confirms multiple blocks simultaneously. This increases the network’s throughput, allowing it to process greater transactions per second, while decreasing confirmation times.

The team has continued to launch upgrades aimed at improving various aspects of the network’s performance. In May 2022, the Fantom Foundation released an upgrade which enabled nodes to sync with each other over three times faster using what it calls “snapsync”, and implementing most of EIP-1559; Ethereum’s mechanism for calculating and processing network transaction fees. The Foundation is bringing on several new researchers and engineers to work on their own smart contract execution stack; a new “Fantom Virtual Machine”. 

On the commercial side, the Fantom Foundation has also been active in supporting teams building apps on the network through its investment arm and grants programs. As of today, decentralized finance (DeFi) projects on Fantom have an estimated $631 million in total value locked (TVL), placing it among the top 10 chains by that measure.

The Fantom Foundation is staffed by a team of over 40 people, eager to continue improving the network, while growing its community of users and application developers. Despite their lean size, the team appears to be punching above their weight. According to data from Nansen, the seven-day active wallet addresses on the Fantom blockchain was 5.81 million in January 2023 - second only to the BNB Chain. At the time of writing, the Fantom network processes over 400,000 transactions daily.

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