Fantom launches $6.5M development fund, placing its faith in ‘safer memecoins’

Fantom, a Layer-1 blockchain, aims to promote “safer memecoins” by allocating $6.5 million worth of its native FTM token to incentivize developers, as it seeks to enter the nearly $50 billion sector. Michael Kong, the CEO of Fantom Foundation, intends to establish an environment that ensures projects are not fraudulent or scams. While Solana and Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2 Base have dominated the recent memecoin trading frenzy, with Solana even surpassing Ethereum’s trading volumes at its peak in March, a study by Cointelegraph’s Magazine discovered that one in six memecoins on Base were scams, and numerous meme-based projects on Solana were quickly abandoned by their creators after raising $26.7 million. To attract memecoin traders to Fantom, Kong announced at the MemeGlobal event in Sydney on April 30 that the Fantom Foundation would create a 10-million-FTM prize pool ($6.5 million) for memecoin teams. Kong views the memecoin phenomenon as a means to acquire a large customer base and replicate the success seen on other chains. He defines a successful memecoin as one with a democratic launch that distributes tokens widely among the community rather than concentrating them in a few hands. The foundation’s co-founder, Andre Cronje, proposed measures for safe memecoins, including involving the Fantom Foundation as a co-controller of the token’s startup liquidity. Cronje also suggested splitting the token supply, with 5% allocated to the team, 10% for marketing locked in a multisig wallet requiring the co-signature of at least one foundation member, and the remaining 85% placed in an FTM-paired liquidity pool. Fantom currently ranks as the 38th largest blockchain network with a total value locked of $108.3 million, according to DefiLlama. In comparison, Solana and Base are the fourth and sixth largest networks by total value locked, respectively.