Phantasma Chain: The Environment Friendly Ghost

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PhantasticPhantasma

4 min readMar 15, 2021

The environment friendly solution

Since its inception in 2018, the Phantasma team has been on a mission to provide solutions for all of the issues plaguing legacy blockchains like Ethereum. Phantasma has improved upon the limitations of legacy blockchains by building their chain from the ground up. Phantasma includes features like NFT minting, oracles, storage, email and chat natively built into the chain. This has not only allowed Phantasma to deliver next generation technology, but also to overcome the high costs of minting NFTs and the absurd energy consumption of legacy blockchains that use a Proof of Work (PoW) algorithm like Ethereum.

The solution to the absurd energy consumption issues of legacy blockchains

The Phantasma team has certainly covered all the bases from a technical perspective, and one thing they made sure not to overlook while designing the platform was how the Phantasma blockchain impacted the environment. That is one of the reasons the Phantasma team decided to use a Proof of Stake (PoS) algorithm as their consensus mechanism. In a PoS algorithm, a set of nodes vote to validate transactions. The tokens of the network are not created through performing arbitrary highly complex calculations, and therefore no mining is necessary. This eliminates the need for continuous hardware upgrades and the soaring energy costs associated with solving these cryptographic puzzles. Also, there isn’t a need for the entire network to be involved in the transaction validation process, which improves scalability.

Environmental impact of PoW mechanisms

The two most important promises of blockchain technology are decentralization and an immutable record. A consensus mechanism is needed to ensure these promises are kept, and to prevent malicious nodes from overpowering the other nodes of the network via a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Malicious nodes can also trigger false transactions, causing a double-spend attack — spending the same token twice.

Due to its reliance on a PoW consensus mechanism, Ethereum has a huge energy footprint. Ethereum mining consumes a quarter to half of what Bitcoin mining does, which means that for most of 2018 it was using roughly as much electricity as Iceland. In fact, the typical Ethereum transaction gobbles up more power than an average U.S. household consumes in a day.

“The PoW part is the one that’s consuming these huge amounts of electricity. That’s just a huge waste of resources, even if you don’t believe that pollution and carbon dioxide are an issue. There are real consumers — real people — whose need for electricity is being displaced by this stuff.”
— Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum

The **Ethereum Energy Consumption** Index provides the latest estimate of the total energy consumption of the Ethereum network.

Environmental impact of PoS mechanisms

Phantasma has adopted a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus algorithm which uses a hundred times less energy compared to Ethereum. Phantasma’s PoS algorithm requires users to have a stake in the network to become a validator (block producer). After staking, validators are then rewarded with a share of the transaction fees. The validators also use a rotational scheduling per side-chain to define who the active block producer is. This process occurs in parallel for each side chain, allowing for horizontal scaling to boost the theoretical transactions per second of the chain. Each validator is responsible for accepting transactions from Phantasma users, verifying signatures & transaction contents. Each type of block producer is rewarded differently for providing their computational resources to the Phantasma network:

Active Block Producers — receive 75% of the BP’s share of the inflation of the governance token (SOUL), plus a minimum of 25% of the transaction fees for blocks which they validate.
Standby Block Producers — receive 25% of the BP’s share of the inflation of the governance token (SOUL). Starting with 10 active BPs and 15 standby BPs, the number of total BPs on Phantasma will increase as the ecosystem expands.

Join the revolution

With the absurd energy consumption and high NFT minting costs out of the way, the possibilities are endless. Phantasma Smart NFTs are poised to revolutionize the way we interact with art, music and games in the coming years. If you want to join the revolution, check out GhostMarket. GhostMarket is the only cross-chain Non-Fungible Token (NFT) marketplace in the world! One of its most powerful and innovative features is the uMint NFT Factory. This next generation self minting console allows artists and developers to create and sell NFTs powered by Phantasma’s Smart NFT technology. Create next generation Smart NFTs while at the same time helping to reduce the carbon footprint of blockchain and NFTs.

Protecting your environment — enabling creativity and ownership,

The Writer’s Lounge