Phantasma Link & Poltergeist v1.7 are live!

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PhantasticPhantasma

4 min readApr 26, 2020

Phantasma Link

Phantasma Link - the dApp connector making life easier for users and developers alike is now live, and brings with it a host of new advantages for Phantasma. Along with it, a significant upgrade of Poltergeist has just been released in v1.7, including support for Phantasma Link.

One of the hurdles dApp developers usually face is handling the security aspect — securing private keys, signing transactions and so forth. This is an extra, complicating factor which requires significant resources to get right and test extensively to ensure there is no unnecessary risk for users of the dApp. Phantasma Link is a dApp connector that carries with it the power to free dApp developers from this concern, as well as infusing dApp users with confidence using new dApps since they can rely on the wallets they know and trust. What it allows at a high level is to connect any website or dApp, for example an NFT sale website or a game, to the Phantasma blockchain. The connection is made through the wallets which have added support for the Phantasma Link protocol.

One of the main benefits of Phantasma Link is that new developers now can start developing any type of dApp to interact with the blockchain without worrying about the aforementioned security aspects as this is handled on the wallet side. This way developers can focus solely on what they should be focusing on, developing stellar dApps. In short, it significantly lowers the treshold for onboarding new devs and new dApps.

A way to think of Phantasma Link that will be familiar to many users is to see it as a Metamask for Phantasma. Initially the connection is made through the regular phantasma wallets Poltergeist and Phantom Wallet, but in an upcoming version the connection will happen through a browser extension wallet.

The first wallet to enable Link support is the dual chain Poltergeist wallet, with Phantom Wallet seeing this feature enabled shortly after. Two dApps are already readily available to be used with Link: The 22 Racing Series NFT Sale site, and the marketplace. To get started using the power of Phantasma Link, just log in on either site with your Phantasma Link enabled wallet (requires Poltergeist v1.7) and you can interact with the blockchain directly from your usual browser. For a quick walkthrough of how Phantasma Link works, please watch this short video:

Poltergeist v1.7

While a major change in Poltergeist v1.7 is the integration of the Phantasma Link protocol, a host of other improvements have also been made in this version. Among the most important ones are dApp hosting capabilities and automatic selection of the best RPC available to you. On each launch Poltergeist will automatically select the current best node — and if for whatever reason your connected RPC should suffer any issues you can simply close and restart Poltergeist to automatically connect to a new live RPC.

To properly install Poltergeist v1.7 please note the following;

Mind that it is highly recommended that you back up you WIF prior following these steps:

Log into your Phantasma wallet(-s)
Click account
Click export WIF
Paste it in a text file and print or write it down.

To upgrade from v1.6, start by shutting down Poltergeist if it’s currently running. In Windows, Linux or OSX simply extract files to a new folder or delete existing files and extract to that directory. It’s advisable that you restart your device or computer prior to this to ensure that no existing installations are running in the background.

Note: To enable the automatic RPC node selection to distribute load globally and optimize performance on your device, if you have just upgraded from an older version pre v1.6, please do the following: