CryptoDiffer x Phantasma Chain Community AMA
Thanks to all Souldiers supporting Phantasma Chain in the CryptoDiffer community voting on Telegram, CryptoDiffer hosted an AMA with Phantasma Chain on October 30th, 2019. We love how this shows the huge support from the Phantasma community; you guys are great!
The AMA lasted for 2 hours and started with 3 questions from the CryptoDiffer team. After that, the community had the opportunity to ask away. This resulted in a wide range of questions. It was up to Lee Kai Lee [PR/Marketing] and Sergio Flores [Co-Founder/CEO] to make sure the community got all the information they asked for.
In this AMA you will learn why the project is called Phantasma; where the team’s passsion comes from; what features are live and how they effect both users and developers; insights on Phantasma’s plans in the gaming industry and a lot more!
Take a look below and you’ll find new information even the biggest Phantasma fans weren’t aware of yet!
CryptoDiffer questions
Q1. Can you explain Phantasma in short?
Phantasma is a blockchain for content distribution (we recently launched our main net). We are building a whole ecosystem for everybody’s needs. More importantly, Phantasma is building a bridge between all dApps from other blockchains. We will support the best dApps from all good blockchains, made possible by our cosmic swaps feature for automatic conversions between coins. For example: if you don’t have Ethereum to pay for Ethereum dApps purchases, the Cosmic Swaps feature will automatically convert any supported token such as EOS or SOUL to Ethereum for the purchase. We believe that by building the best Ecosystem with dApps from all kind of blockchains and increasing user friendliness can we achieve global adoption, not by competing each other in technical specifics.
Q2. What kind of features does the blockchain have right now and what features are available in the future?
Phantasma currently has a live mainnet which already implements all the features that we expect to see in a modern blockchain.
One interesting point is that our chain was not a fork of anything but rather completly designed and written from scratch.
We use advanced cryptography based on Edwards curves (a more performant alternative to ECC based on Schnorr signatures).
We have fully independent side chains for maximum scalability, we have powerful support for token swaps (both onchain using cosmic swaps, and between Phantasma and other chains, allowing true interopability).
All of this is powered by smart contracts, a decentralized file storage and an advanced oracle system, making Phantasma a one-stop solution for dapp developers.
Regarding the future, while most of the hard work is done at chain-level, there are still many features that need proper integration at frondend level, this is our goal for the next months.
Q3. Phantasma is building a whole ecosystem. Is there any genre the team focuses on expanding first?
Yes there is actually, our team is a true believer of initial adoption through games and gamers. The gaming market is huge (and still growing!) and the majority of this market are millenials or youngsters, it is proven that this public is able to adopt emerging technology much faster. We are definitely not ignoring this, therefor our initial focus will be on gaming and everything around it. Including an NFT marketplace, which also supports NFTs from all other blockchains.
There are multiple games in development on Phantasma, a few of which won our latest dApp competitions: Phantastic Casino and BlockBoi, while Nacho Men is a game that our team is developing ourselves. There are more games lined up (5 more games confirmed) once we added some compatibility improvements to our SDK which should happen soon.
This year we also established a huge partnership with a professional game dev studio: GOATi Entertainment. They will be launching a RTS racing game called 22 Racing Series on Steam, Playstation and Xbox next year. We almost have daily contact with all these developers, so we know what to expect and where they are at regarding their roadmap.
Of course if the community likes gaming dApps from other blockchains, we can simply support those dApps within our platform. 😉
Community questions
According to the CryptoDiffer AMA voting poll many people voted Phantasma. This shows community support toward Phantasma. Do you have any plans to participate in a Binance community coin voting?
We are aware that the Binance community voting has relaunched and it is something we definitely want to take part in. However, keep in mind that the application form is not just an ‘’apply here and get on the waiting list’’. Binance is a professional business, so we are making sure that all our submissions are correct.
Why is Phantasma reliable for developers for creating dApps?
Phantasma is open-source, so we welcome any third party developers to develop dApps on Phantasma. More importantly, we have the Phantom Force which will help fund developers. In the future, Phantasma community can vote on dApps and developers for them to receive funding in proportion to the votes they received, all through smart contracts. Also, our team is available to contact directly if issues arise during dApp development. Compare this with Ethereum where a dApp developer would be talking to Vitalik for help, this wouldn’t happen.
What kind of features can be used by developers on Phantasma Chain?Features which could be utilized by developers are Cosmic swaps, Storage, Oracles, NFT marketplace, blockchain interoperability, Onchain Governance system (on chain voting feature). And don’t forget that our blockchain supports 5K TPS with a block time of 2 seconds.
Phantasma is presented as an innovative platform to revolutionize application development in the key area of data management and content-sharing. So, without using a 3rd party to store users data/contents, how will it be done on Phantasma platform while ensuring uploaders still can delete/edit their content if its necessary?Phantasma presents a way for dapp creators to allow their projects to use a decentralized storage system that is tighly integrated with the chain economics. The actual amount of storage of a user / dApp is tied to how much SOUL tokens they stake.
But as with most decentralized storage, the actual file content is not stored on the chain, the chain only stores hashes of content, with the actual content being distributed over the network nodes. This allows for great control, letting the users edit content as necessary, also allows smart contracts to read and manipulate data.
As a public chain, how does SOUL differentiate itself from other well-known public chains?
In blockchain its not easy to inovate an existing project, mostly for two reasons:
- Decentralization means its more difficult to reach consensus regarding development of a project
- Adding new features to an existing blockchain is extremely difficult and time consuming, sometimes even pratically impossible
Phantasma started as an improvement to existing projects, a concept to create a new generation of blockchains based on learning the errors from the past.
We saw a need for a blockchain that made things easier both for users and developers. So based in our team experience in the area, we came up with a set of features and economics that we think can really make an impact on the crypto ecosystem.
How does Phantasma Foundation generate revenue?
Revenue is not a problem for us at the moment, the funds we raised during ICO is sufficient to complete our roadmap. We don’t take any cut % of any sales from third party dApps dApps. However we do have a few revenue models in mind which will be active soon. One of them being Nacho Men with the NFT sales (and more to come from games we will develop). And maybe something which nobody knows yet. We are planning to integrate a revenue model for Phantasma community in the Phantasma Chat which we are building, can you already guess what? There will be more revenue models announced in the future.
What is your inflation and deflation in Tokenomics?
Phantasma does have an inflation model of 3% per year. 1% (so 1/3) goes to the Phantom Force which will help attract developers to Phantasma, because they are receiving funds from the Phantom Force. And 2% (so 2/3) goes to the Block Producers which are the core ‘’nodes’’ of Phantasma’s blockchain. There are 2 types of BPs: Active and Standby, so BPs will need to market themselves to the Phantasma Community and show why they should become Active BP for more revenue. Believe it or not, the inflation model will be one of the main reasons of Phantasma’s future success. By incentivizing developers, the ecosystem will grow much harder than the 3% inflation.
What are the Key Features of Phantasma Chain and how is Phantasma Chain better than any other Blockchains?
The main point of Phantasma is that we bring all features under the same token. This is useful both for developers and users, no longer it is necessary to keep several tokens for different features. We learned from other projects who tried dual token systems, we saw what failed there and created what we consider the perfect dual token system. SOUL unlocks the features (staking, voting, storage etc) and also emits KCAL which in turn is used as transaction fees.
Comparing to other projects, well, we could say that Ethereum is still king in terms of adoption, but at technological level they are almost a dinosaur at this point. There’s the new Ethereum version coming out, but since it was something not designed from day one, it will still suffer from the “tacked-on with glue” that is common in complex tech projects. Regarding Ontology and other similar projects, they rode the waves of the crypto bubble and got stagnant, our tech is on a completly different level compared to those previous generation projects.
What makes users interested in Phantasma Storage rather than Google Drive?
It’s a completly different set of things. Google drive is good for huge amounts of static data, and quite cheap for that. The Phantasma Storage is not meant to be a direct competitor for Google or similar companies.
What we offer is data that is not on the hands of any entity, but not only that, we allow our storage to be connected directly to blockchains, and this is where the magic happens. For example, at this point most “dapps” are not really dapps at all. If their website disappears, puff, in most cases there is no more “dapp”.
Phantasma Storage allows the whole site to be stored in a decentralized way, accessible in any situation, from a browser or even offline if necessary.
Not only that, it also introduces some new concepts like having smart contracts read and write data to the storage. This allows a smart contract to distribute data to different users, or to trigger specific company rules based on specific files being uploaded with the right numbers etc, the possiblities are endless.
When you look at your website, your graphics, your logo or even your fonts, it gives the impression that you are in a game. Frankly, I like it. Why did you use such a style in the visual part of your project?
Most of Phantasma team members have a gaming background. Both the Co-founders Alex and Sergio met each other through being involved in the gaming market. So if you think it might look like some kind of game, that might be the reason. But more importantly, this is how we want to do the branding of Phantasma. We want to represent a business which can interact with its very own community in a fun way. Most of our models are gamified for this same reason, think about the Sustainable Energy System and later gamification in the Phantasma App. We want a fun but also a professonal easy to use platform for all of our users, so expect everything we build to have some gamification integrated!
What is the role of Block Producers and Phantom Force in Phantasma Ecosystem?
BPs are the core of the blockchain and producing and validating blocks. They will be competing eachother for the active BP spot by marketing themselves in name of Phantasma (self sustainable growth by third parties). Phantom Force will help fund third party developers to build dApps on Phantasma. It will host dApp competitions and it will have Kickstarters. Find more info here.
What special features does the main network launch? How easy will it be to develop Dapps on the main network?
The mainnet launched with pratically all features that we promised (smart contracts, token swaps, oracles, storage, voting, etc)
Right now it is quite easy to develop dapps for Phantasma if using C# / .NET / Unity. We also have support for C++ (done by goati/22series) and other programming languages like Java. There is also work being done to support Solidity, allowing Ethereum devs to easily support Phantasma.
What are the advantages of the Onchain management system?
It is simply a very good use of the power of decentralization. Users of the ecosystem can make their voices heard by expressing what changes they want to see, and if majority is reached, the chain automatically applies the changes without node operators requiring to do any update.
What is the difference between POS+ and POS?
Don’t think of POS+ as something specific, its more of an umbrella word to say that is based on POS but with some extensions on top.
With our dual token model we arent really a traditional POS system, but rather a form of next-generation POS.
Why did you choose to develop SOUL on the NEP5 platform?
We did launch SOUL as a NEP5 because we had close ties with the NEO team and City of Zion. We had some plans to cooperate better but they were moving too slow and we decided to just split from it.
What is the value of the SOUL token generated by?
The value of SOUL is 100% defined by the market. Sometimes good projects have small marketcaps, while abandoned projects have higher marketcaps, they dont have to make much sense, I guess the thing that influences it the most is word of mouth, so do your part teaching your friends about Phantasma!
Sergio told us that Phantasma Chain will have oracles and that it will be a gamechanger. I am not a tech guy. Why is this necessary for dapps and why is this a gamechanger. Is it also needed for games like 22Series?
Oracles are what allow a smart contract to interact with the outside world. It allows reading external data be it a financil stock price, a weather in some city or a winner of a soccer game.
Oracles are already implemented in the chain and currently they are used for token swaps. The chain knows via oracles how much NEO a SOUL is worth, how much KCAL a SOUL is worth etc. that way. But this is just one of an infinity of possible use cases.
Games can surely use oracles too, but it is too specific to the game itself, so in the case of 22Series they might or not might use, it is up to them.
Besides Oracles, Phantasma has several features helpful for games, like untamperable onchain leaderboards, NFTs for tokenization of ingame items and other assets, and also the chain interopability via token swaps which allow mixing Phantasma with NEO (and in the future, Ethereum, Bitcoin and any other important big chain).
Phantasma has so many outstanding features in the form of innovative staking mechanism and dual token system, it allows for users to access different digital goods & services such as communication, entertainment, marketplace and storage. But, do you have real users and partners that use your services and what marketing strategy do you have to draw new users as without marketing no matter how good the product is nobody cares? Also, what possibilities and opportunities does Phantasma provide to the developers, enterprises and the community?
First of all I would like to share that Phantasma is not necesserily built for enterprises. Phantasma is built for the regular consumer, although it does support enterprises to built on top of Phantasma for all their needs, our dev team made sure of that; we are indeed building a one-stop platform!
Our current roadmap for this year is to complete Phantasma Mail & Chat. And once the Chat is live, we are considering migrating the Telegram Channel to the official Phantasma Chat which is available in the Phantasma App (Will be collecting data soon: pros vs cons and community feedback). Don’t worry, if we go with this route, the Telegram Channel will still be moderated. Basically the whole ecosystem revolves around the Phantasma App, so by bringing the Telegram community to the Chat integrated within the App, every user will be introduced by all dApps supported in Phantasma App.
One of our main marketing strategies is to support dApps from other blockchains into Phantasma App, together with some promotions in the form of give-aways or something else, this will introduce people from other ecosystems to Phantasma. We have prepared and are preparing our marketing based on the Phantasma App once its live. Had hoped we would have launched the App together with mainnet, but as there are no specific Phantasma dApps yet to be integrated in the App, and we figured out that most of the community simply wants to stake their SOUL for the time being, we now have more time to improve the App in user experience. See the video below for a proof of concept of the app including tokenswap!
How many games are going to be launched before 2020 and in 2020?
About number of games, we are in contact with 7 different developers, plus we have our internal team with Nachomen which, after that, has something already planned for Phantasma. We’re launching more competitions soon to attract more talent, plus we’re always going to gaming events to spread word about Phantasma (PAX recently as an example) so expect the number of announced games to grow.
Is the implementation of Phantasma Chain in the game of GOATi mainly for 22RS only or are there larger plans for cooperation? For example, by building the tech that can also be easily implemented in other games (as a kind of standardized framework).
The GOATi implementation is not specific for 22series, they are doing it in a generic way that allows other games to connect with Phantasma quite easy.
What are the next steps after the mainnet launch? Where does the main part of your community come from?
Some of the next steps are in here: click! Important to know: we don’t collect any data from our community, not even from our users. This would be very counter-intuitive to what our vision is. There is no specific country we are targeting, specifically like I mentioned before: our initial focus is the gaming industry. With the games being deployed on Phantasma, especially a triple A game such as 22 Racing Series by GOATi Entertainment, we believe that we could kick it off and become one of the leaders in blockchain for gaming. Other platforms have the advantage of quantity of games, which we could simply support in our App. But we have the AAA quality game. Expect more information soon regarding the 22RS NFT sale and beta. The game is already fully playable and GOATi is travelling the world to visit many gaming conferences showing their beta and even make people play it.
Expect more information soon regarding the 22RS NFT sale and beta. The game is already fully playable and GOATi is travelling the world to visit many gaming conferences showing their beta and even make people play it.
What is the MKNI token and what is its role in Phantasma’s ecosystem?
MKNI is a fun token minted by our team, as Bill — who is one of our core team members — loves to wear the mankini and talk about it, you can PM him and he will gladly show you a picture (semi-NSFW). It currently is more of a collectors token, but I heard rumors from some of the third party developers that they are planning to integrate the MKNI token in their dApps. The actual utility is still a secret, so it would be wise to collect the MKNI token while you can!
What is the uniqueness of Phantasma that cannot be found in other projects that have been released so far ?
All blockchains have good components, some of them focus on one or multiple specific industries. Our blockchain and SDK is build for all use cases, simply pick a developer from the streets, ask him what he is currently building and whatever his answer is, that person could use Phantasma SDK to build it on Phantasma. And something I mentioned before; Phantasma acts as a bridge for dApps from other blockchains, there are only a few which are working on interoperability.
Will the core Phantasma team always exist or be eventually phased out and merged into phantom force?
Our team will always be involved with Phantasma, we don’t have plans to move away. Whether it is as a Foundation team member or perhaps later as a Phantom Force member to stimulate decentralization (pros vs cons & community feedback).
What plans does the core team have to ensure there will be proper support for new developers looking to use and understand the platform?
We will later write technical guides on how to use our SDK and Spook to help educate new developers overcome this bridge.
Can you share your vision about NFTs in the near future?
NFTs are quite interesting. While for now they are being used mostly for gaming, they are so versatile that they can be used in tons of other areas, hopefully Phantasma can help with the adoption regarding that aspect.
We also dont want to make our NFTs an exclusive thing, Phantasma is all about good design decisions from the start, and having the chain features merge with each other. So NFTs blend quite well with the chain swap mechanism, which allows in theory to have any NFT from other projects to be brought into Phantasma and then outside again.
We saw SOUL listed on Coinmarketcap on May 2018, it’s a long time for alive. May you share how SOUL survived in this long bear market and what difficulties you have overcome during this period?
This is simple to answer, we cashed out our funds way before the big market drop in December 2018. Another benefit is that we didn’t heavily expand our team with the raised funds. Most teams went crazy and expanded their team 2–5 times because they raised multiple millions while the market went parabolic in 2017 — to later crash. A lot of funds were wasted on developers they later couldn’t support the salaries of, and had to cut down. Phantasma had already established a solid team before we had the ICO. We knew exactly how much funds we needed to finish our roadmap.
In my opinion, the biggest problem of dApps now are high fee for users, security, less scalability and poor display. How would SOUL solve these matters?
I think the biggest problem with dApps right now is blockchain/crypto. Blockchain/crypto in general is relatively hard to use, and we acknowledge this. Therefor we want to make every simple aspect of our ecosystem and platform easy to use. Access wallet with a simple fingerprint or password, basically make everything simple to use for the non-crypto users, we are using our own mothers as threshold of how easy blockchain dApps should be to use.
Regarding high fees; not the case with Phantasma. Users can stake SOUL and receive daily KCAL on a ratio 1 SOUL = 0.002 KCAL. KCAL is the network resource token of Phantasma, so it will be used to pay for fees. You are basically generating the KCAL for free.
Scalability; every Phantasma dApp will be built on its own side-chain, so it will be scaled horizontally and vertically with 5K TPS and 2 sec block time.
Security; actually blockchain is very secure. One of the advantages is that only the user controls its own funds, but it sometimes is a drawback too, if the user loses the private key or sends the funds to a wrong address.
How did you guys come together in past to start this project and whos idea (from whole team) was to name the project Phantasma and its ticker SOUL?
The team was assembled mostly from people I knew with tons of experience in crypto, both the technical side and the economical side. Later we expanded the team based on recommendations from the existing team members. We always kept our team small because it allows us to have a more close bond, instead of being just some hundred guys working in an big office without barely knowing anything about the project or each others.
About the names: in the beginning I created most of them, I always wanted to make it have a more relaxed / fun side, specially since we knew that besides crypto the gaming area was the thing we had more experience in and these kind of naming schemes are a good fit for that.
Is a membership needed to place or build dApps on Phantasma? How will content on the platform be priced?
Phantasma is Open-Source so membership is not necessary. A big advantage for third party developers is that we do not take any % from the revenue they are making. They are entirely free to decide how to monetize their own dApps.
What difficulties have you encountered during the development of Phantasma ?
The amount of work required to create a blockchain from scratch, specially one with all features we have. It is one thing to create a blockchain that works just for cryptocurrencies, but once you add smart contracts on top of that, it gets way too complex.
We adopted many programming industry standard techniques to make sure things keep working even when we had to rewrite several parts, for example if you look at our Github you can see that we have hundreds of automatic tests in place to catch any bugs that might appear from thinkering with the chain code.
Do your characters in NachoMen grow in price?
It is an open market, if you have a good luchador then people may want to pay a high price for it.
In some countries, crypto payments are still not available right now. So do you think Phantasma will have diffculties expanding to these areas?Phantasma will support FIAT gateways in the future.
Can you tell us how you see 2021 for Phantasma?
In 2021 our roadmap and platform is fully finished. The ecosystem is growing every day and Phantom Force has many developers who are developing dApps.
What are your personal expectations for the impact GOATi’s 22Series game will have for usage / adoption of Phantasma’s chain and services once it is launched on Steam and consoles?
What truly interests us about 22 Racing Series is that everybody is able to make revenue. Right now Pro-gamers are the only ones who play the game for their career and generating revenue. Gamers usually play the game to have fun, to compete or to collect. Gaming on blockchain can combine all three aspects and even add revenue to that, as long as the in-game assets are tokenized that is. We think this will attract the youth as well as gamers who are familiar with crypto already. Besides that, 22 Racing Series is one of the only AAA games I personally know which are launching a game on Playstation/Xbox/Steam. They have solid partnerships with many big gaming industries including AMD.
With regards to gaming what does, in your view, Phantasma bring to the table that traditional solutions and also other blockchain projects don’t?
Phantasma provides funding for developers which other platforms usually don’t want to do. GOATi for example had a few blockchains they were interested in to integrate into their game. I quote Garth, the Managing Director of GOATi:
‘’Depths of smart contacts — there are things we want to build that will be a great disruption in the Esports and game industries that other chains absolutely couldn’t do and hadn’t considered’’
‘’Creation of NFTs. Enjin for example require developers to pay them for every NFT they put on chain, regardless of whether it’s free or sold. Steam don’t even do this. Phantasma makes it possible to create NFTs basically for free’’
Phantasma thinks about the community and the developers, as we believe that they are the core of our future success. We are building the platform, while you are the ecosystem. We do not take any cut from revenue from other parties.
Clickables!
Phantasma
- Phantasma Chain: The blockchain for next-generation content distribution.
- Phantasma Medium: Keep track of all news regarding Phantasma development.
- Phantasma Discord: This is the more technical oriented community. Are you developing for the Phantasma ecosystem or do you want to get started with that? This is the place to be. Team members and other developers are active in Discord to help you out.
MyCryptoSpirit
- Our website, your dose of crypto! We provide articles, crypto reviews, video interviews and demos of blockchain gaming. We are also happy to help out the Phantasma community with articles, tutorials and more!
- MCS Telegram: Join our community at My Crypto Spirit and engage in discussions about our content, crypto projects, blockchain in general and your favourite blockchain games. We like to take it easy in there; so feel free to join the community, discuss different topics and generally just have fun.
Games
- What are NFT’s?
- Follow the Phantastic Casino Twitter to stay up to date on its progress. We heard there will be some sweet updates soon!
- For more details about the game 22 Series Racing, take a look at their newly updated website.
CryptoDiffer
- Check out the CryptoDiffer website and follow the interesting news channel in Telegram.
