Future proofing the Phantasma blockchain

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PhantasticPhantasma

4 min readSep 30, 2020

Monitor, enhance, test — repeat cycle — deploy!

Over the last six months the development team at Phantasma has been hard at work gradually implementing cumulative upgrades and additional functionality to future proof our blockchain.

More than a hundred separate tasks have been completed during this period with regards to both the core chain, relay nodes and interoperability — with some issues and edge cases being detected and their solutions implemented as incremental upgrades on top of others as we thoroughly tested each and every item as they completed.

To list every single task does not provide much actual insight for the average reader, so let us instead take a look at some of the major improvements that have now been implemented.

Phantasma — Ethereum interopability

Both at a core chain level and through our oracles, we have been able to fully integrate Phantasma — Ethereum interoperability (see separate article to properly understand the significance of this achievement).

Throughout this development we have launched incremental improvements to our Ethereum side smart contracts, initially testing on our private NEO — Phantasma — Ethereum trio of private chains before migrating to the Ropsten Ethereum testnet for final checks before Ethereum mainnet deployment.

Our “Swiss army knife” multi tool Phantasma Spook has been refined to support pain free swapping and handling of Ethereum based assets, with both RPC “relay” nodes and block producers now being fully compatible and ready to handle our integration of the Ethereum ecosystem.

Adding support for the highly variable fees on Ethereum and customizable Gas fees with recommendations given based on actual chain load, we wanted to ensure a seamless end user experience with low treshold for usage by current SOULdiers and Ethereum users alike.

Future proofing the Phantasma blockchain

A core attribute for any blockchain meant for real world adoption is the ability to stand the test of time, handle heavy load and to be scalable to meet future needs. A massive influx of new users automatically means that new and creative ways of using the blockchain will be found, and this in turn means that the significance of any lingering edge case bugs is amplified.

For this reason, a massive amount of time and effort has been spent hunting down and ironing out even rare edge cases that could have caused problems down the line with increased usage. During this process several rare potential issues with certain transaction types have been identified, fixes implemented and thoroughly tested to ensure the smoothest possible user experience. Some of these improvements cover Phantasma — NEO swaps, where both issues with occasional “stuck swaps” and intermittent delays in the ability to claim swapped tokens have been addressed.

On the subject of cross chain token swaps, an additional custom plugin has also been developed that significantly shortens the time it takes a block producer to synchronize storage of past Phantasma — NEO swap history when implementing upgrades and resynchronizing data with the blockchain. Working on the interface between Phantasma and other blockchains has also enabled us to lay additional groundwork for future integration of even more blockchains that would be of value to the Phantasma ecosystem.

In anticipation of significantly increased load from a growing user base, our RPCs are being upgraded to carry a full copy of the chain along with multiple other functional improvements. This means that RPC nodes will be able to handle a much larger share of the traffic (querying different types of information from the chain) without having to make calls to the block producers. This effectively reduces the load on block producers and improves their performance and stability. In addition, preparations for further increases in the number of block producers have been made in multiple areas.

Miscellaneous

While the Phantasma — Ethereum interoperability, swap improvements and future proofing the blockchain have been the main focus of the work done in the past months, we have also taken the time to implement additional upgrades to auxillary services. Among these are certain block explorer issues that previously could cause butterfly effects on the chain impacting block producer performance, minor optimizations to NFT burning and minting transactions, as well as rectifying issues caused for both the block explorer and our main website by Cloudflare. Both the Phantom and Poltergeist wallets have been upgraded to reflect the Ethereum integration.

Summary

As our fellow SOULdiers know, massive efforts from both our core developers, our Phantom Force developers as well as a team of core community members and RPC node operators have gone into completing development and painstakingly thorough testing of these upgrades. With everything that has currently been implemented we aim to be able to handle pretty much any challenge users can put the chain through.

As with everything Phantasma related every test done, every task completed and every feature implemented comes from a place of genuine dedication to and love for the disruptive possibilities this technology brings to consumers around the world.

Get the full story

This article is part of a larger series covering the massive upgrades being implemented across the Phantasma blockchain and ecosystem. To get up to date with everything that has happened, please enjoy the following articles:

To the future of blockchain,

The Phantasma Team