Like many, I ventured into the word of bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and blockchain staring at dollar signs by initially looking at flips to see if I could make some quote unquote ‘easy gains’.
Of course, I made huge losses because I never seemed to hold onto a coin long enough to not FOMO into the next one that ‘banged out doubles’ in satoshi’s or USDT on listing on some crappy exchange with no liquidity.
With the success of Bitcoin and Ethereum, there seemed to be so many new players coming on the scene, each project jumping on the Ethereum ICO bandwagon to offer some kind utility or value.
As a novice, I was intrigued by some of the offerings and claims. I thought every idea could sell and the key to winning was getting in as early as possible.
Not many coins offered anything beyond a decentralised and tokenised version of an already existing ‘something’ as a service for which in hindsight the ‘cryptoverse’ coined the overarching term ‘shitcoins’.
The space was awash with ‘shillers’ trying to tell you why one coin was better than its competition. Meanwhile, all that my normal sized brain could decode was faster this, smarter that, side-chain this and off-chain that.
To understand better, I started reading whitepapers to rationalise if a project really made sense. I understood utility and value justification to be at the core of rationalising the need to have a token underpin a blockchain then further checked the ‘tokenomics’ justification for letting go of my hard-earned ETH.
In addition to justifying whether a project needed a token in their ecosystem to begin with, it also dawned on me that many projects made claims that were ambitious, with theories hardly proven and close to no working concept. I was often left none the wiser because all projects wanted to predict a future that reinforced an aspired demand and articulated this in their whitepapers to be broken down by a few cherrypicked social media personalities.
Enter Fusion.
I stumbled on Fusion having had it mentioned by someone in a now defunct Telegram group. I read the whitepaper and was taken aback by the unique proposition of three core features of the protocol.
- Time-Lock feature.
- DCRM (Decentralised Control Rights Management).
- Li-Lo (Lock-in, Lock Out) feature.
The Fusion foundation put forward a showpiece of an ICO (Initial Coin Offering) which was way oversubscribed, but delivered to each subscriber pro-rata their FSN tokens while returning any balance in ETH instantly. I was impressed by the smooth ICO process.
More impressive was that VeChain was the hype at the time and DJ Qian the CEO of Fusion set up BitSe the company where VeChain was incubated alongside Qtum.
Here is where the proposition got greater for me. I met DJ at a London event in 2018, and he broke down the proposition for the protocol with resounding passion and assertiveness. He introduced the concept of ‘cryptofinance’ which is ‘Decentralised Finance’ or DeFi as we know it today. He broke down the concept of interoperability, a feat only a few projects have managed to actualise with varying degrees of success. With this momentum and a listing on Bibox the price of 1FSN was able to rally to an ATH of almost $10.00.
I understood that Fusion’s interoperability solution had more depth to it unlike others that relied on having side chains or smart contracts to achieve this.
Fusion was deep in the protocol encryption layer ensuring that its interoperable solution achieved a mass market appeal by introducing a secure Distributed Control Rights Management (DCRM) solution, limiting the explicit requirement to manage private keys for any token that is locked in or bridged to the Fusion chain.
The most revolutionary feature for me must be the ability to extract time value for any token locked onto the Fusion chain. In traditional finance, we talk about the time value of money i.e. the greater benefit to receiving a sum of money now rather than an identical sum later.
Well, Fusion can extract that value between now and later and assign a value to any locked-in token. A major use-case is the staking mechanism which stipulates a time value of more than 30 days for 5000 FSN coins to be locked in the staking wallet. This Time-lock feature protects the node runner from not risking the full value of his assets while running a node thus keeping the future value or backend of his assets safely stored in an offline cold wallet. Time-lock also allows for a myriad of use-cases for rent, loans, and other investment banking instruments where a time to value correlation is needed.
That London encounter over beer opened my eye to the vision for the project and the future was bright for me as far as I was concerned. Or was it??
So putting all the talk aside, the time was for DJ and the Fusion foundation to deliver on the roadmap and a host of accompanying promises to launch testnet, swap the Ethereum based tokens for some shiny new mainnet coins straight from the Fusion mint followed by mainnet launch and yes adoption and partnerships.
For a long time there seemed to be nothing happening and the asset value started pulling back from the highs as frustration grew with the lack of something, some news, anything to make fusion great again. The community were waiting for a ‘summer of fusion’ but nothing happened.
Soon enough (even though it seemed like eternity), fun times were back when the community rallied behind the foundation to implement the testnet (fixing the infamous merkle root issue), the mainnet coin swap, and a successful mainnet launch. The price started to rally with highs of $1.30 with sights set on breaching the ICO price. Then, all of a sudden, the infamous 4c ($0.04c) happened and all my buy low orders were triggered by a price tank. The wallet used to swap tokens from ERC20 to mainnet was accessed by an unscrupulous actor. There was the talk about inside jobs and a few disenfranchised rebellions within the community with some seeing it as an opportunity to raid the exchanges for cheap dumped Fusion coins. The Fusion chat rooms were on fire with screams of exit scam. In hindsight, I too should have tried to attain ‘whale’ status for FSN but there was nothing to tell us Fusion was not going under.
DJ explained the unfortunate event, but it lingered on in the community for up to four months with people still asking about the progress made since it was disclosed that there was a police case open. The community were also expectant of the release of the killer interoperability feature DCRM, in the hope that adoption through partnerships would materialise.
This was indeed the low point, but it was further exacerbated by the onset of Covid-19 in China. There was constant bickering about lack of progress, no Binance exchange listing and no marketing to bump the lingering low price until DJ broke silence to articulate a vision to get to 1 million users in a year.
He informed of the launch of a mobile wallet called WeDeFi that allowed users to onboard with added reward through referrals. The DApp a staking wallet offering up to 27% APY in rewards for depositing time-locked FSN coins. The app also allowed users to bet a small quantity of the upfront value of some of their coins to be in with a shot of winning full value coins. One user has won 80,000 FSN ($50,000 at today’s price) with no risk to his reserves bar the 2-month time value. WeDeFi is now ramping up its user-base while scaling up with a promise of fiat on-ramp (enabling credit/debit card purchases), and adding more coin deposit options including BTC, ETH and USDT amongst others.
DJ orchestrated a mind shift in the community from building and onboarding partners to building a userbase and scaling out through decentralised applications (DApps).
Within a short time, the world’s first Cross-Chain Decentralised Swap Market Place known as Anyswap was birthed and this put the cat amongst the pigeons. Anyswap operates on the Fusion blockchain and allows users to trade tokens by swapping seamlessly between pairs while offering its own governance coin ANY.
The bold but unsurprisingly fitting release comes with a new vision “We are back. Fusion is back. We are going to have biggest cross chain DEX (Decentralised Exchange) in world on Fusion and the biggest challenger bank on Fusion. And that is so close” to quote his exact words.
Anyswap was built on Uniswap code but applied to the unique feature set offered by the Fusion blockchain opening the DEX use-case to non-evasive interoperability with DCRM thus supporting 95% of tokens using ECDSA and EdDSA algorithmic encryption. Currently launched with only one pair, Anyswap is already in the top 10 based purely on market capitalisation. DJ maintains that in 3–6 month it needs to become the cross-chain DEX with highest liquidity and largest trading volume. He is laser focused on one thing only which is scale. “Technology is nothing in this space because decentralised means open-source”. “Anyone can copy your business model, but they are not able to copy scale”, he said.
Building Anyswap is just one instance where an existing DApps’ capability can be ported to Fusion. As Fusion was built on a fork of Ethereum, it can still harness all the unique features that will be present in Ethereum 2.0 while allowing for other use-cases to be expanded beyond the scope of Ethereum
When pressed on how to evaluate the magnitude of a DEX, DJ theorised a possible framework of KPIs that are integral to his strategy including
1. Number of transactions on chain meaning how many times the chain is used.
2. Number of unique wallet addresses.
3. Number of users and growth rate.
4. Distribution of the users i.e. if users are only in one country or locale or dispersed globally because blockchain efficiencies are meant to address cost through solving trust problems and the biggest trust problem lies in contingent cross-border systems.
5. Gas consumed vs total circulating supply, this KPI reveals the circulation speed of the gas system for the DEX.
To summarise here are some of the reasons why I believe Fusion is a winner
1. A visionary leader who saw the future of crypto aligned with decentralised finance and has a head start in the most robust of implementations utilising four of the finest cryptographers in the world.
2. A project that is fully open-sourced and one that can build on the functionality of other open-sourced projects to surpass their scope and reach in the crypto space using its unique trustless interoperability solution for end-to-end decentralisation.
3. An ambitious project that survived through the dark winter days to reinvent and position itself in the DeFi space ready to take market share from the early movers with its richer technology.
4. A project offering underpinning technology with multiple use-cases enabling agility to respond to a change in paradigm as many projects jostle for notoriety and success in this new envisioned decentralised world.
5. A Fusion community that is once again united, collaborating and fully focused alongside the Foundation to bring Fusion to its rightful place to realise DJ Qian’s vision.
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