Phantasma Protocol (SOUL) Review – A Decentalized Content Sharing Platform

| Publish date: 05/28/2018 (Last updated: October 24, 2018 06:58 AM)
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Coin NamePhantasma Protocol
Coin TickerSOUL
Token TypeNEP-5
Total Tokens100,000,000
Website URLhttps://phantasma.io
White Paper URLhttps://phantasma.io/phantasma_whitepaper.pdf

Phantasma provides a decentralized content distribution system that gives users the opportunity to control their own content. It will run first on the NEO blockchain and later be modified to use the NEOX cross-chain agreement for greater interoperability with other blockchains. Since Phantasma prioritizes privacy and security, all data within Phantasma is encrypted, which means that no one can access data except the user. It’s a new way to share email, photos, invoices, movies, and much more.

Phantasma Website

The Idea and the Team Behind Phantasma

Storing data on the blockchain is expensive. The infrastructure for efficient management of data doesn’t yet exist. Scalability is still a major challenge. And they are always at the whim of complete control from a third-party. From Napster to PirateBay and Lavabit (the email provider used by Edward Snowden), many content distributors have been shut down by centralized systems.

With more and more decentralized applications starting to run on smart-contract platforms such as Ethereum and NEO, the demand for usability and the ability to develop is increasingly sought after. Another challenge is how to manage, store and access data. Storage of data on the blockchain is expensive, and the infrastructure for managing it is still lacking. Phantasma offers a platform where users control their own content without reliance on third-parties to manage, secure, and store their data for them.

Phantasma Team

Phantasma’s team is headed by co-founders Sergio Flores, Miguel Ferreira and Alexandre Paixao. Sergio is a City of Zion developer and blockchain consultant. He has extensive experience working with NEO. Miguel is also an experienced developer, specializing in distributed systems. The development team all has extensive experience in blockchain, smart contracts, mobile and web development. Phantasma is based on Lisbon, Portugal.

The Phantasma Technology

With the rise of cloud storage, users are able to store data online, accessing them whenever and wherever they want. But these files are vulnerable to hacks and are at the whim of third-parties for regulatory or administrative changes, as well as access to the information. In addition, with more and more DApps being developed to use on the blockchain, there is a greater need for DApps that are more user-friendly and customizable and allow better data sharing among DApps.

Phantasma seeks to solve these challenges by offering a decentralized content distribution system that sets the standard for secure and seamless data distribution in the NEO ecosystem.

Phantasma chose to build their technology on the NEO blockchain for a number of reasons:

  • Faster transaction speeds, cheap gas costs, and high throughput due to its use of Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus
  • Better scalability solutions
  • A more mature ecosystem
  • NEOX offers cross-chain interoperability

The Phantasma Virtual Machine (VM) runs inside the NEO smart contract. The VM can be programmed to execute different actions, including the execution of the smart contracts or allowing access to Phantasma boxes, which hold data. For example, a VM could program on-chain payment with the automatic delivery of content.

Phantasma’s technology has many real-world applications, including: decentralized email, oracles, digital commerce, and video streaming.

The SOUL Tokens

Phantasma’s network is powered by the SOUL tokens – in other words, they are utility tokens. There are several different parties involved in the transaction of utility tokens:

  • Producers – Those who provide valuable data to the ecosystem or a specific DApp. They can be individuals or organizations.
  • Consumers – Those who are using the DApps which require data to function. (Consumers can also be producers in P2P applications such as email).
  • Operators – Users running Phantasma operate the nodes, which are responsible for the network’s availability, speed and reliability.

Consumers need tokens to pay for data, who turn it over to producers of data and developers. Consumers pay for storage and network services.

The ICO token price was $0.23 for every SOUL. Since Phantasma’s platform is NEO-based software, the token will be NEP-based, which is the NEO equivalent of ERC20 Ethereum tokens.

The original 100 million number of tokens will be distributed as follows:

  • 65% went to the token sale
  • 15% went to the development and maintenance of the platform
  • 20% went to the team and advisors

The Phantasma Network

The Phantasma platform has a number of concepts that need to be understood to comprehend the function of the network:

  • Boxes – Boxes are content hubs for data. Each is associated with a specific NEO address and will be given a name for better identification.
  • Users – Users are individuals or organizations that are using Phantasma to share or consume data. For example, they could be using a smart contract to pull data from a box or an application.
  • Message – These are data items that can be stored and shared via Phantasma.
  • Gate – Permissioned gateways to a Box. Data is given customizable permission via Phantasma’s Virtual Machine. They can be different payment models: free-to-access, pay-once or subscription-based.

To access a Box, users must send a request, which goes through the Gate script that validates whether or not the user has permission to access to Gate. If granted access, it also charges the pre-determined fee for access to the Box.

Soul Tokens Allocation

The Phantasma Network

The Phantasma platform has a number of concepts that need to be understood to comprehend the function of the network:

  • Boxes – Boxes are content hubs for data. Each is associated with a specific NEO address and will be given a name for better identification.
  • Users – Users are individuals or organizations that are using Phantasma to share or consume data. For example, they could be using a smart contract to pull data from a box or an application.
  • Message – These are data items that can be stored and shared via Phantasma.
  • Gate – Permissioned gateways to a Box. Data is given customizable permission via Phantasma’s Virtual Machine. They can be different payment models: free-to-access, pay-once or subscription-based.

To access a Box, users must send a request, which goes through the Gate script that validates whether or not the user has permission to access to Gate. If granted access, it also charges the pre-determined fee for access to the Box.

Phantasma Network

The Phantasma network has five separate components:

  • Blockchain – Phantasma will initially run on the NEO blockchain and later on migrate to the NEOX cross-chain protocol.
  • Smart Contracts – The smart contract handles the messaging, storage, and tokens.
  • Software Development Kit (SDK) – SDKs allow developers to use Phantasma to create their own DApps.
  • Relay Nodes – This layer sits between the NEO blockchain and the Phantasma apps in order to allow faster delivery of content. It will also function as a queue system to reduce strain in the blockchain.
  • Distributed Content Storage – To save costs on data transactions, Phantasma will be backend-agnostic to support various backend storage systems for storing data.

Phantasma Data File System (PDFS) will be the Phantasma’s own storage system. It will be an extension of the Relay layer and give nodes incentives for storing data.

Phantasma Data File

The ICO and Roadmap

Phantasma’s goal is to raise $10 million with the sale of 65% of its 100 million SOUL tokens. It plans for the private and public token sale to take place in Q2. Later in Q3 it will release the Phantasma SDK and Oracles Nodes as an example of applications that can be used on the SDK. By the end of the year Phantasma hopes to modify the Phantasma technology from using the NEO network to using the NEOX protocol.

Phantasma Roadmap

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