Legendary DeFi developer Andre Cronje returns! Joins Fantom's board of directors, shares next year's development plans.

Andre Cronje, a key figure in driving the development of DeFi, announced in April this year that he would not return, stating, "Cryptocurrency is dead, long live cryptocurrency!" He has since dedicated himself to working as a cryptocurrency legal advisor. However, after hinting at a comeback with a meme posted on Twitter in November, he has now officially announced his joining of the Fantom board today.

Andre Cronje Returns and Fantom's Future Development Plans

According to the latest article released by Andre Cronje, he has officially been nominated and accepted positions as a member of the Fantom Foundation and Fantom Operations board of directors. He also shared with the community Fantom's development plans for the upcoming year, outlined as follows:

1. dAPP Gas Tokenization Plan: Reduce the gas fees of FTM tokens from a destruction rate of 20% to 5%. The reduced FTM tokens from destruction will be used to reward creators and developers in the Fantom ecosystem. The mechanism is similar to revenue sharing for creators on platforms like YouTube and Twitch.

Full introduction: Fantom Governance Proposal "Gas Tokenization" Introduction! AC: Fantom will become the YouTube of blockchain platforms

2. Gas Fee Subsidies: Allow users to interact with dApps without having to pay gas fees from their wallets, creating a better user experience. Users will not need to possess or understand FTM tokens.

3. Account Abstraction: No longer differentiate between contract accounts and EOA accounts, all will be considered contract accounts. Contract accounts can initiate transactions and pay gas fees, while EOA accounts will be used to control permissions for contract accounts to execute operations. This means EOA accounts will act as roles for email and password, social identity verification, or Face ID for social recovery and a better user experience.

4. Economic Abstraction of Gas Fees: Allow payment of gas fees with tokens other than FTM, depending on account abstraction.

5. New Middleware Fantom Virtual Machine and New Storage Mechanism: This is a focal point for Fantom, as EVM remains the current main bottleneck. Overcoming this issue could push the boundaries of hardware limitations.

6. Engineering Performance: Optimization will be done using tools developed by the Bernhard team and others until hardware throughput limits are reached.

7. Documentation and Training: In the past, the Fantom Foundation has focused on teams already familiar with Solidity. Moving forward, they will train new builders and non-blockchain native developers, updating documentation.

"Our goal is to expand the base layer to make it easier for developers to build simpler dApps to attract users, while providing them with sustainable non-token-based business models," said Andre Cronje.