Fantom (FTM) strengthens bullish outlook with Sonic upgrade

Fantom (FTM) price is looking to hold onto recent gains after bulls rode the broader crypto market sentiment to hit a 3-month high. Fantom price has benefited most from the massive 35% upside seen over the past week. Can an upgrade, whose testnet was just announced by the Fantom Foundation, catalyse further upward momentum for FTM?

Here’s what to know about the Fantom Sonic upgrade and what it could mean for the network.

Fantom announces Sonic testnets

On October 24, Professor Bernhard Scholz, Fantom’s chief research officer, made a major announcement regarding an upgrade that could see the blockchain network benefit from a bump in its throughput and transaction finality.

The testnet environment will consist of two testnets – public and closed. As Scholz points out in a blog post, the upgrade will see Fantom significantly improve its platform functionality without having to resort to features such as sharding or additional layers.

In particular, the Fantom Sonic upgrade is set to replace the Opera upgrade, bringing a new virtual machine, better database storage, and optimized consensus to the network.

According to Scholz, Sonic could see the network achieve over 2,000 transactions per second and an average finality of 1 second. Comparatively, the Fantom mainnet supports a throughput of 30 TPS. The Fantom Foundation noted:

“Sonic is the next iteration of the Fantom network, with no hard fork required for the upgrade. Existing smart contracts, services, and tools on Fantom Opera should be fully compatible with mainnet Fantom Sonic.”

Alongside the Fantom Virtual Machine (FVM), Sonic is also expected to activate reduced storage requirements – from a staggering 11 TB to under 1 TB – for archive nodes. This means network participation becomes both more affordable and accessible for validators.

FTM price outlook

Fantom’s Sonic upgrade news hits the market amid an uptrend that’s just starting to gain momentum following the crypto downturn. FTM has been one of standout performers among altcoins.

However, with FTM price down 93% from its all-time high of $3.46 reached in October 2021, it can only be better for bulls if a bull market coincides with such a huge upgrade as Sonic. This upgrade, expected in Q2, 2024, will not only be good for the DeFi ecosystem, but also blockchain games, and other dApps.

An uptick in adoption across DeFi protocols on Fantom could aid long term price.

Fantom price chart on TradingView

In the short term, while FTM/USD has spiked in recent weeks, the biggest hurdle is to break above a downtrend line that’s constrained bulls since the flip from year-to-date highs in February.

The immediate resistance zone could be around $0.31, above which would lie $0.54 and $0.63 before buyers may target the psychological $1.00 level. On the downside, robust support could be at $0.17.

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