10 Questions About Phala You Should Know

3 min readMar 24, 2020

1. What is Phala Network?

Phala Network is a privacy-preserving cloud computing service, which is based on Substrate and will run as a parachain of the Polkadot ecosystem to offer computing power comparable to existing cloud services and protects the privacy of managed programs. Based on TEE-Blockchain Hybrid Architecture, developers can deploy confidential smart contracts running inside the TEE Enclaves in the CPU.

2. Who founded Phala?

Our core team members came from famous Internet companies such as Google, Tencent, etc. Hang Yin, Co-founder and Chief Scientist of Phala Network, was the head developer for the new Equihash mining algorithm of Bitcoin Gold.

3. What product does Phala have?

pDiem: a confidential computation component built for Libra granted by Web3 foundation
Web3 Analytics: a cutting-edge data analysis tool for next-generation, able to analyze user data and output results without invading personal privacy.

As Phala Network grows, there would be more amazing applications and services based on Phala to serve people and our communities.

4. What technology does Phala apply?

Phala applies TEE (Trusted Environment Execution) which allows confidential data to run in an isolated and private environment and outputs results alone with authorization.

An example:
Google wants the DAU (Daily Active User) data in the recent 100 days on Facebook. Facebook is willing to share yet worrying about user data leak. Here’s how they could perfectly solve the problem with Phala Network:

1. Google developers write their requests into codes on Phala Network and send them to Facebook;
2. Facebook developers receive the requests and started to run the codes locally in Facebook’s nodes;
3. Only results are outputted and sent to Google, instead of all activity information containing sensitive user data.

5. What’s the difference between Phala and projects of the same kind?

The-best-of-its-kind interoperability.
We allow different contracts to call each other before executing computation, which is hard to realize for many other projects. We’ve been discussing relevant solutions with Parity and have come out with a mature plan.
Besides, compared with other confidential computation projects, we focus more on cross-chain of data, not only deposits and assets. Our vision is to enable ANY BLOCKCHAIN to be served with our confidential computation technology.