Phantasma is a new platform defining both a storage specification and a protocol for sending messages from one source to one or multiple destinations via smart contracts. Phantasma running on top of the NEO blockchain then will be using NEOX cross-chain protocol to proceed fork into its own blockchain.
Phantasma Overview
The Phantasma Protocol is composed of five components that also represent different stages of the project. The component structure is designed in a way that it will be pos- sible to bootstrap the network from the initial components, and then gradually expand the system by developing the remaining components.
1. Blockchain: Initially to bootstrap the network, Phantasma will live as a service running on top of the NEO blockchain. Later on, it will be adopted to use the NEOX cross-chain protocol and from there proceed to fork Phantasma into its own blockchain. This will give us complete freedom to take the data collected during the first phase, and redesign the transactions in order to both obtain maximum performance, avoid GAS costs and reduce strain on the NEO blockchain.
2. Smart Contract: The backbone of Phantasma is a smart contract running on NEO blockchain.
Messages – The main function of the contract is to handle the messaging protocol, which runs on top of a small VM allowing mini-contracts to run inside the Phantasma smart contract.
Storage – The content storage mechanism is also controlled via smart contract, which allows proper regulation and distribution of storage claims and data blocks in- tegrity.
Tokens – Phantasma uses a token as fuel for the protocol, and this token follows the NEP5 formal specification.
Distribution – Part of the contract will be dedicated to token sale, including dis- tribution interfaces and asset swaps.
3. Software Development Kit: A software development kit that will allow any developer to use Phantasma to create their own dApps. In technical terms, it will allow the abstraction of dApps’ communica- tion with the Phantasma smart contract, exposing all available features of the protocol and updated with support for new features and components as they get available. It will be initially available for the C# language, and upcoming support for other languages will be added (eg: Javascript). Besides the actual SDK, a proper documentation full of examples is also included.
4. Relay Nodes: Most current blockchains are bound by transaction and block confirmation speeds. While NEO is currently the fastest production-ready smart contract platform, the block times of 15 seconds will not be fast enough for certain classes of applications. The Phantasma relay will be a secondary off-chain layer sitting between the NEO blockchain and the Phantasma apps, allowing not only faster delivery of cryptographic signed content, but also act as a queue system, packing and merging content as necessary to reduce strain in the blockchain.
5. Distributed Content Storage: Most real-world data is voluminous enough to make it prohibitively expensive on save on-chain. However, currently there is not a perfect solution for this, but rather a group of competing standards. Hence Phantasma will be backend-agnostic and it will be pos- sible to support various backend storage systems to store the actual content of messages
Phantasma, a new generation of decentralized content sharing platform
Phantasma brings an decentralized content distribution system running in the blockchain, with strong emphasis on privacy and security. It’s a platform where users control their own content, instead of relying in third parties entities to host, secure and manage it for them.
Relying in third party services for something as critical and personal like email is dangerous. Companies can be hacked, bankruptcies can happen and government entities can force access into emails. And for those who are creating videos, games, music and other monetized content, giving up a large percentage of your revenue can be very discouraging.
Not only that, content creators are fully tied to the platform holders who often do drastic rule changes that lowers their revenues, to which creators have no choice but to accept them.
Interoperability with existing systems is extremely important, in order to ease adoption, so it is imperative that blockchain technology for end-users is created. Taking email as an example, Phantasma based-mailboxes will be compatible with standard email ad- dresses, and thus can communicate with email systems outside the blockchain.
Privacy is also extremely important, so while distributed, all data within Phantasma is encrypted ensuring total control of content, with no one but the content owner decides who can access it and how it will be distributed. In other words, ownership of the private keys of wallet means ownership of all content stored in that wallet.
And since everything is encrypted, without the private key nobody can read it or steal it from the owners, not even the Phantasma developers can access it.
Team & Advisors
The team is mainly composed of Portuguese developers with experience in blockchain, smart contracts, mobile and web development.
Sérgio Flores
Co-Founder of Phantasma, City of Zion developer and blockchain consultant.
Sérgio came up with the idea for Phantasma after extensive development work on NEO, when he saw how cloud-hosted content was so vulnerable on traditional centralized servers, and how NEO could support a system to solve this. Sérgio is a senior experi- enced developer with 20 years of business and customer facing software development, and a track record of tackling complex structural systems (filesystems, drivers, compil- ers, debuggers - which was the case for his recent development, a NEO debugger).
Miguel Ferreira
Co-founder, senior ‘big data’ and compiler developer and blockchain expert.
Miguel is a senior experienced developer, with years of entreprises systems engineering and academic research on distributed systems. A crypto enthusiast deeply involved with Blockchain and the dApp ecosystem, he sees Phantasma as a new frontier in bringing scalable application development to the people. Crypto investor and Ethereum devel- oper.
Alexandre Paixão
Marketing expert and tech enthusiast.
With a background in management and business development, Alexandre complements the team on the non-technical side of business growth and brings important skills like Marketing and Public Relations to the table, which are key to the increasing awareness and development of the Phantasma platform.
Sérgio Pereira da Silva
Business developer, Fiscal and Legal lead
Economist by trade, crypto lover, Sérgio Pereira is responsible for building valuable partnerships with the larger NEO ecosystem, and evangelizing for Phantasma real world use cases among companies worldwide.
Bruno Freitas
Software developer
Graduated in Computer Engineering, he entered the crypto space as a hobby in early 2017. Found ”AntShares” (NEO now) project and immediately got interested, which resulted on being accepted as a City of Zion developer for his work. Experienced with C# and .Net stack technologies. Specialized in cross platforms applications, Bruno is in charge of the mobile development of Phantasma.
Bernardo Pinho
Software developer, QA/Tester
The most recent and youngest member of the team, Bernardo is a crypto enthusiast and passionate developer. A recent graduate from a top engineering university, he is com- pletely devoted to blockchain development, with previous experience on the Ethereum ecosystem.
Rafael Barbosa
Graphic Designer
Rafael from an early age began to work as a graphic designer attending to ESAD Matosinhos, one of the best schools in Europe, and developed projects for international companies such as NOS Primavera Sound Porto and others. One of his major interests in the design world is helping business promote themselves effectively.
Neeraj Murarka
Advisor
Co-Founder and CTO of Bluezelle, Scientist and technology entrepreneur.
Gordon Hall
Advisor
Expert in applied cryptography, security and privacy. Author of the Storj protocol
Roadmap
The roadmap is very good. The Phantasma project will have two separate teams, one working in the core tech and the other building working products. Those products will be open-source and will showcase the power of the Phantasma tech.
Q3 2018 — Release of Phantasma SDK
Q4 2018 — Relay nodes will be completed
Q1 2019 — Phantasma storage release, Mainnet and SDK support of native blockchain
MVP is available for demo on the website.
Verdict
Positive for short term flip
Neutral for long term hold
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