Fantom DAG 2.0 — An Explainer

Quan Nguyen
2 min readAug 22, 2022

Fantom introduces a new DAG 2.0 model in its Lachesis consensus protocol.

Fantom is much faster, as transactions are stacked in a DAG and are approved simultaneously.

  • Nodes create event blocks, which form a DAG.
  • Fantom uses both DAG (of event blocks) and generates a blockchain (a chain of confirmed blocks).
  • Fast transaction propagation, fast event block generation and confirmation.

Fantom’s model has several advantages over the traditional approach.

  • Traditional approach:
    Nodes can create and then have to confirm each block one by one. Blockchains have to wait as each event block is added one at a time.
  • Fantom’s approach:
    DAG 2.0 utilizes past event blocks (that are yet confirmed) so as they fan out more and more event blocks can be added. They are conceptually stacked and then are approved at once.

Block formation:

  • When an Atropos event block is found, it will confirm transactions in the event blocks under Atropos’s subgraph. All is confirmed at once. Then a new block is created.
  • This new block will include all event blocks in the Atropos’s subgraph that haven’t not been confirmed previously. All the txns of the newly confirmed event blocks are added into this new block.
  • Epoch: after each epoch, a new DAG is created in the new epoch. It consumes a little resource and so there is a little overhead.
  • No state explosion as in other DAG 1.0 models.

This makes Fantom significantly faster (than others).

Cheaper:

  • No mining: because the DAG uses txns it doesn’t use miners.
  • No ‘super’ mining machine is needed. This makes DAGs cheaper.

More decentralized:

  • There is no single miner that can mine a whole block, so it’s not be controlled by a particular validator. Hence, it is more decentralized and more secure.

Fantom is DAG 2.0 + dPoS, and hence it’s model is significantly better (security + scalability).

So the above gives key advantages of Fantom.

More details please read our technical papers.

White Paper v2.0 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2108.01900.pdf

There are much more there to explore: dApps and dedicated people for the tech.
Come and build with us!

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Quan Nguyen

Quan Nguyen is interested in R&D on Blockchains and DLT. He is currently the CTO at Fantom Foundation. His background is Cloud, Web Apps, InfoVis, PL, VM.