Fantom (FTM) Surged 19% Today. Should You Buy?

Fantom is a fast, cheap alternative to the Ethereum (ETH) smart contract blockchain that appears to be following ETH's latest bounce higher.

One of the top performing cryptocurrencies over the past 24 hours has been the in-house coin, FTM, of the Fantom blockchain. As of press time, FTM posted a surprising 19.6% pump to a price as high as $0.3391 per token for the day, while also posting a 35.6% spike for the last seven-day stretch. According to CoinMarketCap, the trading volume for Fantom coin rocketed more than 123% compared to yesterday showing strong trading interest in the asset.

Fantom launched in 2018 as a proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain that was purpose built to be a smart contract competitor with Ethereum. Smart contracts are types of software that run on certain blockchains to automatically fulfill conditional transactions that are more complex than just sending and receiving digital assets. Fantom claims to have the fastest smart contract settlement times compared to any other blockchain, coupled with cheap fees and scalability to handle tens of thousands of transactions per second.

While Fantom developers haven't announced any specific news to explain today's price jump, a possible reason for FTM's surge could be the growing buzz surrounding the Ethereum Merge to create a PoS platform, and its tentative "go live" target date of Sept. 19. Historically, when transaction volume increases on Ethereum for decentralized finance operations or non-fungible token (NFT) trading, there tends to be spill over of funds onto other alternative blockchains such as Cardano, Near Protocol, and Fantom -- which seems to be the case here.

Is Fantom a buy?

The FTM coin hit its peak price of $3.48 on Oct. 28, 2021 and even at today's intraday top, it was still 90.4% lower than its record high. This is not financial advice, just market observations. Every investor needs to gauge their own funding risk levels and conduct their own research. However, as the crypto sector seems to be close to a bottom, there appears to be a lot of potential upside for a proven blockchain such as Fantom for anyone interested in starting to dollar-cost average into the crypto space.