Not all altcoin tokens rely on the market performance of Bitcoin in order to generate their own trading volume. Fantom, a token that trades under the FTM symbol, has pretty much ignored the major pullback that took Bitcoin down from its lofty $55K perch to its new $43K support level just a few days before the 20th anniversary of 9/11.

While Bitcoin was suffering despite being made legal tender in El Salvador, Cuba, and Ukraine, FTM appreciated by more than 100%. This solid growth seems to be at least partly due to the market’s renewed focus on other altcoins. Bitcoin is not the only major token going through bearish woes; Ethereum has only been able to hold its own thanks to the side chain projects that decentralized technology developers have been launching this year.

The cryptocurrency market also appears to have hit some resistance around $40,000 for Bitcoin. Some analysts see short sellers trying to break below this psychological level and there appears to be a level of interest for the bulls to return, but that may not take place over the next few weeks.

The FTM gains this week can be explained by fundamental updates. Investors like what they see in Fantom’s smart contracts, which are not only fast but also secure and stable due to its “trustless” and robust consensus mechanism. Forbes has announced the list of the world’s fastest networks based on data provided by a variety of well-known sources, and FTM is leading the pack. The design philosophy of Fantom seeks to enable large-scale decentralized applications that are not limited by the capacity of the underlying blockchain. The technical and business aspects of the FTM project have pleased many investors who like the recent milestones achieved by the team and community. The core development team has been pretty good in term of providing an introduction to the architecture, technology and use-cases of Fantom.

As a layer-one platform, all FTM smart contract transactions are recorded in the blockchain and are public. On the other hand, the layer-zero smart contracts are a set of smart contracts that are stored on-chain and are immutable and self-executable. All communication between these two layers are carried by off-chain communication channels.