Leaderless Proof-of-Stake
Unlike traditional Proof-of-Stake systems, where some validators decide on the validity of the transactions, Opera is completely leaderless. In other words, the validators do not determine which blocks are valid.
Removing leaders increases network security substantially.
You can stake on Opera with a minimum of 1 FTM.
If you have a strong technical background and at least 1,000,000 FTM, you can run a validator node.
Read how to become a validator.
Fast Finality
Opera’s strong point is its fast time to finality, thanks to the underlying Lachesis aBFT consensus mechanism.
Previous consensus mechanisms such as Proof-of-Work, used by Bitcoin and Ethereum, are based on probabilistic finality and require a certain amount of time for transactions to be considered irreversible.
Bitcoin has an average time to finality of 60 minutes or six confirmations. Ethereum has a faster block time than Bitcoin, and its average time to finality is 6 minutes or 25 confirmations.
On Opera, a transaction is considered finalized and settled in 1 second.
EVM compatibility and Solidity compiler support
By being fully compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, developers can write, deploy, and run smart contracts as they would on Ethereum, but on top of a faster consensus mechanism.
The EVM currently used by Opera is the default go-ethereum VM implementation. It does not include the enhancements we have proposed in the paper “The Economics of Smart Contracts.”
Open-Source
For developers, it is easy to build dApps on the Opera mainnet. All information is available on our GitHub and our code is open-source.
Acquiring Opera FTM
You can acquire mainnet FTM on some exchanges, including Binance and Kucoin. Alternatively, you can swap the ERC20 version using https://multichain.xyz/.