Phantasma Protocol: A decentralized Future for Content Distribution

There’s no such thing as a free content distribution platform — and events of recent months have provided painful reminders of a truism in online content: if you’re not the customer, you are the product.

Deep in the small print of the user agreement, you signed away permission to Gmail to scrape your emails for keywords, your social profiles to serve up targeted ads, the right for the networks you use every day to monetize what you have created a dozen different ways… And they promised to host and look after it for you, at least until the next time they got hacked or breached or taken over, when you could lose it altogether (just ask former users of Megaupload, if you think this can’t happen)

We trust these third-party services with everything from our precious memories to our most innovative creations, because the concept of cloud storage has created a dangerous illusion, that everything we care about is somehow not controlled by a handful of powerful corporations with no public service mandate or user representation.

So, with new privacy law on the horizon in Europe imminent, there is an evident hunger for an alternative. A way for users to genuinely own and control their content, where storage is distributed and secure, and creators are fairly and transparently rewarded. Enter the Phantasma Protocol.

When Sergio Flores created the NEO-based dApp for the City of Zion competition, he didn’t anticipate the surge of user demand which followed. But this product stood out to potential adopters who wanted new tools for creating, sharing and monetizing their content in the broadest sense, and were impressed by the tangible proof of concept in the highly theoretical world of blockchain innovation.

To ensure delivery of the vision, Flores assembled a powerful team including Neeraj Murarka, the CTO of Bluzelle, who pioneered distributed ‘swarm’ sharing for resilient and secure network storage. This appointment, in particular, underpinned the commitment to create a decentralized platform on which any developer can build their dApp of choice, demonstrating the versatility of the structure itself.

The Phantasma product suite has started with the provision of encrypted but fully interoperable email — but there are many kinds of content ripe for disruption, and the software development kit will release in Q3 2018. So email is just the start, and the next dApp could distribute anything from a live concert stream to a 10-hour training course.

This presents challenges to the basic blockchain infrastructure, but by leveraging the security and trustlessness of the NEO blockchain with a secondary node network, Phantasma addresses the age-old conflict between accessibility and security: mixing on-chain hashing of content with an off-chain storage system means fast streaming and no blockchain bloat, as well as user control of ultimate persistence of any given item — not every passing message requires immutable encoding, and provided the access is secured the not every file needs to be locked in the blockchain itself.

But what the blockchain brings to the table is control.

Phantasma gives you absolute power over who can access your content and on what basis. The Soul token ecosystem enables any distribution model, from a totally private email sent from one individual to another, to mass streaming in real time, all controlled by public key encryption.

You as the creator have the power — after all, it’s your content. What you do with it should be up to you, so you’re not locked into an unfair monetization model or unable to get your content back out when you want to.

With Phantasma, peer-to-peer distribution comes of age, and puts the control back where it belongs.

If you want to be part of the revolution in user-controlled content, the Phantasma Protocol crowdsale starts on May 22nd 2018, but you need to be on the whitelist — Round 2 registration opens on May 10th at 3 pm GMT+1.

You can also keep up with Phantasma Protocol on Telegram and Twitter, and check out the whitepaper, roadmap and team on their website today.