• It will now only require 50,000 FTM tokens to self-stake on the Fantom blockchain in a move that aims to boost security and make it challenging for attackers to launch 51% hacks.
• The Fantom Foundation dismissed concerns that more validators would slow down the network, claiming that submitted transactions will now reach a validator faster as there are more to choose from.

It will now require only 50,000 FTM tokens to become a validator on the Fantom network in a move aimed at making transactions faster and the network more secure.

The Fantom Foundation announced the move recently, revealing that it had cut down the validator self-staking requirements by 90% from the previous 500,000 FTM tokens (equating to $200,680 at press time) to 50,000 tokens worth just over $20,000.

According to the Foundation, the move resulted from a vote that the community took mid-last year.

One of the key benefits of the move is boosting the network’s security. As the number of validators multiplies, it will become increasingly more challenging and economically unviable for attackers to target Fantom with a 51% attack. Blockchain attacks require the malicious party to take over at least 50% plus one of the network’s validators, and the more they are, the more difficult it is.

Will More Validators Slow Fantom Down?

The concern for many has been that the more validators there are, the slower it will be to achieve consensus. However, according to the Foundation, this won’t be the case.

On Fantom, individual validators confirm transactions on their own, after which they bundle them and share them with other validators. This is unlike networks like Ethereum, where all validators have to confirm the same transactions. A transaction bundle is finalized once two-thirds of the validators receive and agree with it.

With more validators, two scenarios will arise:

• Submitted transactions will reach a validator faster as there will be more to choose from, resulting in faster transaction bundling.
• Once the individual node broadcasts its transaction bundle to other nodes, reaching the required two-thirds for consensus will take much longer.

The Foundation noted:

With these points in consideration, we don’t believe more validators will slow down Fantom. As long as new validators are running on quality hardware, the network will be more secure and won’t see any downgrade in performance as it maintains the 1–2 second time to finality.

While this change will revolutionize Fantom in the long run, it won’t be as impactful in the short term. The existing large validators are expected to continue dominating. Even if thousands of small validators join the network immediately, users will unlikely feel their impact.

“Well, we’re positioning the network for the future. Smaller validators will grow in size slowly and become a vital part of Fantom,” says the Foundation.

The FTM token has been range-bound in the past month and has only lost 1% in value. At press time, it trades at $0.4048. Its volume in the past day has seen a massive uptick, rising by over 50%.