Ethereum Classic Jumps Into DeFi With Fantom Partnership, But Only as Collateral

ETC Labs and Fantom Foundation are collaborating to bring decentralized finance (DeFi) to Fantom’s ecosystem, a Feb. 10 press release announced. Ethereum Classic (ETC) will serve as collateral for issuing a stablecoin similar to Maker’s DAI on the Fantom platform.

Fantom will be using the Xar Network, a DeFi framework specifically developed for the project. The framework uses some of Fantom’s Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus technologies, such as Lachesis and TxFlow, to offer a blockchain environment that supports advanced DeFi options. The system allows collateralized loans, synthetic assets, atomic swaps and is interoperable with external blockchains such as Ethereum and Binance Chain. 

Ethereum Classic will only function as collateral on the Fantom platform. The stablecoins will live on Xar Network’s blockchain-agnostic stablecoin protocol, named Collateralized Stable Currency Tokens (CSCT).

Fantom primarily targets enterprise and governmental use cases, using ETC to mint stablecoins on permissioned networks. 

The issuing entities will maintain full control over the collateral, in addition to having the ability to earn interest from staking the stablecoin.

ETC is reportedly preferred over its more famous twin due to its commitment to immutability, as it was born from the unwillingness to manually revert the results of a smart contract hack.

The collaboration will gradually expand the available uses for ETC within the Fantom ecosystem. The toolkit allows for significant interoperability between different Fantom blockchains, as well as those on the Cosmos network. 

Though Ethereum Classic could in theory host DeFi platforms as well, its role appears to be relegated to that of collateral asset. For now.