Orion x Fantom live discussion: Twitter Space recap - May 10th 2022

Stéphane: Hi everyone. We're glad to be here. I'm Stéphane Business Development and Operations at Orion. We also have Kapano our Community Manager and Simone from Fantom, the Chief Marketing Officer.

Simone: Thank you, Stéphane.

Stéphane: This integration really allows Fantom users to have access to really what is the world's best liquidity source, centralized exchanges and centralized liquidity, specifically, Binance, KuCoin, AscendEX, which are large centralized exchanges that are currently aggregated by Orion.

Stéphane: Orion provides an access point to the best prices and the best liquidity from the Binance exchange and further exchanges. Simon, what does this mean for Fantom to finally have access to centralized exchanges in a decentralized fashion?

Simone: We have seen enormous growth for Fantom when it comes to DeFi with hundreds of thousands of users and more than 200 Dapps deployed on Fantom. Orion is another piece of the puzzle.

Simone: Orion aggregates liquidity across all the different DEXs and CEXs. It's a huge step forward for the global user experience. 

Stéphane: We believe in blending both worlds, the centralized world, and the decentralized world. The reality is that the typical mainstream consumer isn't currently in crypto but will be. Maybe in the next two years from now, they’ll probably start their crypto journey using a centralized exchange. This is why it's important to have both liquidity sources.

Stéphane: No account, no global restrictions when using Orion. What we do is blend liquidity from centralized exchanges and decentralized exchanges. What this means is, if you're buying a token, we're not going to give you the option of using a centralized exchange or a decentralized exchange. We'll give you access to the liquidity from the centralized exchange and the decentralized exchange, our way the liquidity is blended together. You'll see other aggregators, what they do is, they'll show you the best price on Binance or they'll show you the best price on SpookySwap, then you basically have to select one or the other, with Orion it's really one and the other. So that's a big difference. 

Kapano: Also, that's one of the biggest things Orion brings. It's not the user's concern where the trade is executed. If it's executed on Binance or if it's executed on SpookySwap it doesn't really matter the exchange the trade gets executed on, as long as you get the best price with the least slippage. That from my perspective is the biggest thing Orion now brings to the Fantom chain.

Stéphane: Exactly. We just wanted to make it easy, and simple for users to use Orion, and to have the best prices. The other day I was comparing if you were to buy Bitcoin on Orion using the Fantom chain versus buying Bitcoin on the Fantom chain, but using the official fwallet that uses other aggregators and other exchanges, really the best price was on Orion. And that was like for like a $5,000 or $10,000 order. 

Stéphane: The fwallet makes it super simple for your users to have access to the best prices. 

Stéphane: Our devs are working on Uniswap and PancakeSwap aggregation. That's a big focus for us because we have a lot of projects and the chain that we're also working on right now. You're going to start seeing a lot more growth, and tons of projects want to be involved as it’s a very easy thing for them to do.

Stéphane: Orion is building the right technology. I was just thinking about the complex swaps.  Complex swaps are basically when you go onto a DEX and it tells you there's a route that the trade does. If you want to buy Fantom using Bitcoin, basically you'll sell your Bitcoin first for USDT and then USDT buys Fantom, for example. So that's what we call complex swapping.

Simone: Fees on Fantom are extremely low. So this combination of almost instant transaction execution and very low fees is quite unique to Fantom on top of that compared to other chains Fantom is decentralized. On Fantom, each validator is a block producer, which means that all the 68 validators actively participate in the network. So if one of them goes down, not a problem, there are 67 other chains.

Simone: There are all sorts of financial products like lending and borrowing, algorithm, stable coins and so on plus multiple farming opportunities. This can really be a one-stop-shop for, you know, for all the DeFi needs for, for users. It's easy to actually interact with the network and even actually not necessarily interact with the network. I really like when things are constructed from the users, which is what you guys are doing. These reasons pretty much sum up the whole experience on quantum of why people should use random when it comes to DeFi.

Stéphane: Simone, can you tell us some things coming up from the Fantom team you're really excited about? Can you share some things?

Simone: We're doing some upgrades at the protocol level, and the consensus level to make the experience even better. We are making changes so that validators can join the network even faster. We are making changes so that the blockchain can be improved on the validator level so that we can reduce the storage space, but these are quite technical improvements. Once again, they will benefit everyone more in the long term, we are working on the Fantom virtual machine. The Fantom virtual machine is certainly going to be a  better version of the Ethereum virtual machine. The AVM is what’s good and bad for all DDM trains compared to Fantom.

Simone: It's good because all Ethereum chains are compatible with each other and they're compatible with Ethereum. So that opens up a lot of opportunities, but at the same time, EVM has quite some big limitations, for several reasons. We're working on this new middle web stack, which is the FVM that would be released in phases. We’ll probably see it in the next couple of years, but, you know, we're going to see the initial impact of the FVM not in two years, but probably in a few months, or the beginning of next year.

Simone: We're going to see an even lower time to finality. The transactions will be even faster and possibly even cheaper. The chain will scale better. We recently released an updated version that is fully designed and rebuilt the Fantom Wallet from scratch. It's currently better because we are ironing out a few bugs, and there are very minimal bugs but we're getting some great feedback from the community. We mentioned a new feature that we introduced, in the new wallet. It’s the possibility to swap assets within the wallet. So users can log into their wallet, stake and send assets as usual.

Simone: There’s no need to leave the wallet to do these basic operations. Our devs are working with the Orion devs to integrate it into Orion. I would say in the coming weeks, it will be ready to go. I'm very excited about it. Not only will people be able to swap in the Fantom wallet but they also access the deepest liquidity through Orion. Accessing that BTC liquidity, and also all the top hundred tokens that are not on Fantom, but with the same liquidity would be a game-changer.

Stéphane:  When you select the Fantom network you'll be able to see where our order book really comes from via the logos. You can see the other CEXs that are aggregated and integrated with the backend. You really have access to the world's greatest liquidity resource.

Kapano: I wanted to thank Simone for being here and informing us of some things coming up for the Fantom chain, which sounded really amazing. Also, our listeners, for joining in and listening. Thank you all.

Simone: Likewise, thank you, Stéphane and Kap, it was a pleasure and I'm really looking forward to the wallet integration and any other sort of collaboration that we can do in the future.