This Blockchain Company Is Helping Businesses Globally Move On-chain Ferrum Network is positioning itself as the go-to solution for businesses looking to make the move into blockchains. Their blockchain-as-a-service offering simplifies the switch and protects clients from the dangers of decentralized markets

The blockchain industry has seen massive upheavals in recent years, alongside equally massive growth. Those at the forefront of this technological revolution are finding compelling new use cases for this technology, and globally people are starting to fully understand the potential. But blockchains have several problems. For all the good that they can do, they're complicated to understand, and many businesses face a technical barrier to their application. Depending on the protocol they can be slow and expensive, and many projects opting to launch a cryptocurrency token fall victim to the whims of the market shortly after their launch.

Businesses looking to leverage blockchains are therefore faced with a problem: hiring a developer can be costly and implementing a solution takes time and money. There are many existing blockchains to build on, but few offer support to projects looking to use them. Building an entire purpose-built blockchain from scratch is even more daunting and requires highly qualified developers with advanced understandings of both computer science and cryptography.

Ian Friend and Naiem Yaganeh saw these problems and quickly began developing a solution. Starting from the ground up, they built Ferrum: a fast, interoperable blockchain that is nearly free to transact on. Ferrum's mission is to help bring about the widespread adoption of blockchains by helping other businesses and projects build, launch and run smoothly. As of June 2021, Ferrum has supported more than 100 clients, and has more than $75 million worth of digital assets secured within their network.

At the core of Ferrum is its offer of Blockchain as a Service (BaaS). Seeing the fundamental need for an easier way harness blockchain technology, BaaS providers effectively "host' projects on top of their own blockchain and offer services to help support their clients. This is similar to what traditional web server hosts do, but what Ferrum offers goes further.

Delivering for the blockchain market

One of the biggest challenges facing new projects launching on blockchains is that their token price tends to be unstable. Once released, prices often rise rapidly before falling drastically, and over time investors can lose interest and move on. Ferrum solves this by offering a Staking as a Service solution, or SaaS, to all of their clients. Staking requires a token holder to "lock' any amount of their tokens for varying periods of time. These token holders then receive rewards in the form of tokens or other assets, like NFTs. Staked tokens are incredibly important for new projects as they remove liquidity from the market and incentivise investors to hold, rather than sell. This will often give a project a price floor where otherwise there would be none.

Offering a token to the public also has some serious difficulties. Projects making an initial exchange listing are usually met by armies of bots that snipe tokens from legitimate investors. These bots send prices skyrocketing, often multiples higher than the original listing price, denying regular investors the chance to buy in at a reasonable price. At a certain point the bots begin selling their coins and send the price plummeting, leaving the investors who managed to finally buy at the top with tokens they paid too much for, and the project with a token decreasing in value. Nobody wins, except for those operating the bots.

Ferrum's solution to this problem is simple in concept: stop the bots from trading. Their Anti-Bot Technology monitors token sales for signs of bot activity, including how a user address places orders and even what buyers do in the minutes and hours after a token launches. Ferrum blacklists addresses that show signs of bot activity and prevents them from trading on protected tokens. The Ferrum team also manually reviews every address that is blacklisted, so projects can be sure that legitimate investors aren't being excluded by mistake. By combining SaaS offerings with anti-bot protection, projects that Ferrum help are experiencing stable launches that set the foundation for sustained growth over time.

Ferrum's latest product has also proven to be in high demand. With the advent of cross-chain swapping and trading, projects are finding it increasingly necessary to add liquidity across multiple blockchains. Ferrum has created a white label Token Bridge that allows projects and individuals to bridge their tokens across a variety of different blockchains including Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain and Polygon (formerly known as Matic). As cross-chain adoption continues to garner attention, Ferrum's Token Bridge is already becoming a highly sought-after addition to their range of services.

Ferrum's commitment to their BaaS clients doesn't just help the business: investors and stakeholders also directly benefit from these services. Holders of Ferrum's two tokens, FRM and FRMx, can receive proportional allocations of projects launching with Ferrum's incubation arm, Ferrum Advisory Services (FAS). These kinds of distributions mean that even small retail investors have pre-sale access to projects at prices usually only afforded to large institutional investors.

From the outset, Ferrum has made decisions in the interest of finding customers and building something with real utility. For outsiders this might seem apparent, but in the crypto world there are still many large projects built entirely on promise and do not actually do anything. From their early days in Nigeria, where they helped build a peer-to-peer payments gateway in Africa's largest cryptocurrency market, through to their incubation arm, FAS, Ferrum has consistently delivered for stakeholders, and continues to look for new ways to bring value to their business. Now, with the boom of cryptocurrency markets and the widespread adoption of blockchains, Ferrum's BaaS operation is providing this revolutionary technology to businesses looking to move on-chain with ease.