Poltergeist 2.0

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PhantasticPhantasma

6 min readDec 21, 2020

Phantasma’s Poltergeist has completed its evolution and earned its 2.0 badge! While 1.9 brought massive changes of which the most noteable was triple chain support from a single key and seamless cross chain swapping, there were multiple additional upgrades and enhancements that we wanted to make to further improve the Poltergeist user experience.

Before we dive into these, please note that Poltergeist 2.0 comes with fully reworked account storage, and while the conversion process is automatic on first launch of Poltergeist 2.0, we implore all users to ensure that you have backed up all your WIFs and/or seed phrases before upgrading. Paper backups or securely encrypted KeePass2 databases on removable drives may be suitable alternatives depending on your preferences.

Back up your private keys before upgrading

With that out of the way, there are lots of goodies in the 2.0 bag that we should mention.

NFTs, NFTs, more Smart NFTs!

First off, Poltergeist 2.0 comes with full support for the brand new GHOST NFTs. These are the custom NFTs that artists — including yourself — can create using GhostMarket’s new and shiny self minting service. Bring your art to life — store, view and transact it through Poltergeist 2.0!

Custom NFTs minted at GhostMarket — Bring your art to the blockchain!

In addition, NFT support has been reworked to fully support the upgraded Phantasma Smart NFT standard, including the new long term loyalty rewards represented through the CROWN NFTs — more on those in the main Audi sprint release article.

Built-in blockchain storage

One of the countless features of Phantasma is built-in decentralized storage allocations proportional to your staked SOUL amount, 10MB per 1k SOUL staked which means that a 50k Soul Master receives a 500MB decentralized storage allocation and so on. With Poltergeist 2.0 you can now actually start utilizing your storage space for any files you may wish to store securely.

Securely store important files on the blockchain

Mind that different storage solutions have different use cases — decentralized chain related storage is not built to host your movie collection, while certain important documents that you really don’t want to lose would be a perfect fit. As your storage allocation is dependant on and proportional to the amount of SOUL stake, mind that your proportional stake is therefore locked while the storage is in use to avoid accidental unstaking and loss of data.

Welcome to Phantasma’s native decentralized storage!

Improved cross chain swap UX

To avoid swap claiming issues due to occasional user errors where swap transactions were sent to addresses not saved in Poltergeist, any cross chain transaction is now limited to destination addresses available in the Poltergeist wallet and using the same private key. This means that you can swap from “MyWallet1 [PHA]” to “MyWallet1 [ETH]” or “MyWallet1 [NEO]” and vice versa, but not from “MyWallet1 [PHA]” to another “RandomWallet [ETH]” or “RandomWallet [NEO]” for example. This change ensures that adventurous Poltergeist users will not be able to run into stuck swaps pending in exchange addresses for example.

Swap to your Phantasma mainnet wallet’s corresponding NEO or Ethereum addresses

In addition to this, several improvements were made to the Phantasma — Ethereum swap experience. For starters, Phantasma — Ethereum swaps were reworked to provide a very similar user experience to Phantasma — NEO swaps, which should eliminate some occasional error messages previously experienced while claiming a pending swap. Poltergeist now automatically prevents sending the full KCAL balance if the user forgets to leave some for the transaction fee. An issue handling Infura errors (part of the Ethereum mechanics) that could cause Poltergeist to crash has been fixed, and some Infura calls that were prone to timeouts have received automatic retries to improve user experience.

Where Phantasma — Ethereum swaps previously had a custom fee calculation in Poltergeist, this has been changed to reflect the exact same live fee calculation performed by block producers when processing swaps. ETH/GAS fees are now also shown properly when confirming a swap transaction. On top of this, a checksum verification has been added for Ethereum public addresses to make it compatible with mixed case Ethereum addresses such as are used by Trezor among others.

Improved account management and settings

This aspect of Poltergeist has not received much love since the very first version of Poltergeist was released back in October 2019 — that has changed with Poltergeist 2.0. Instead of the static wallet list and previously somewhat clunky account management, Poltergeist has now received UX boosting functionality like the ability to reorder and rename your accounts along with easier account deletion, export and import features, including improved seed word wallet importing. A bug that could cause account controls to be unavailable if account balances failed to load has also been fixed.

Easily manage all your accounts in Poltergeist 2.0

The settings page has also been reworked, and now includes buttons to open the file location of the Poltergeist log file with better log management, displaying current settings and an own button to reset settings to default values. In the configurable settings an own field for the Phantasma explorer has been added for development and testing purposes.

Various optimizations and fixes

Multiple additional improvements have found their way into Poltergeist 2.0. The previously experienced delay after clicking “Send” is now history, and a more intuitive error message will now let you know that you have internet connection issues if no RPCs can be reached. For Phantasma Link, our dApp connector, app focus switching is now supported across all platforms, and Poltergeist will switch automatically to your Phantasma mainnet wallet if another chain was selected.

Occasionally lagging balance updates that required an extra refresh should now be a thing of the past, and the mobile version of Poltergeist has received more user friendly touch scrolling. Live KCAL prices are now in place, along with a backend optimization which ensures that default settings are used when ‘mainnet’ or ‘testnet’ settings are selected — for testnet settings, the new and permanent Phantasma testnet is now reflected in the default settings.

Among other “nice to have” features you will now find a “View” button for claim transactions, a separate button that takes you directly to the balance page of the explorers for all chains, and an option to show portfolio values in GBP for the British among us.

What are you waiting for?

Go forth and upgrade to the Poltergeist 2.0 experience — user feedback and suggestions is always appreciated, and we trust that you will find this to be a significant enhancement to the already pretty smooth user experience provided by Poltergeist 1.9.

And as we should always do before performing any wallet upgrade, if you haven’t already: