SOULdiers,
We are pleased to announce a complete reimagining of the Phantasma roadmap – a dynamic, living document that will be updated on a monthly basis! One of the core benefits of this is a maximization of transparency on development progress, including much of the work being done that would not normally appear on Phantasma’s past quarterly roadmaps.
Inviting you behind the scenes and into the Phantasma developer hive mind, Senior Developer Paul West has recorded a video where he dives into the most recent strategic thinking regarding Phantasma’ path forward. Alongside this initiative, the Phantasma Contributors will be holding regular town halls on our socials, enabling everyone to tune in and directly engage, asking your most pressing questions and getting answers on the fly. This initiative starts now – with Senior Developer Paul West’s Roadmap & Development Town Hall on Friday, September 29th at 5pm UTC on Discord!
Dok & Senior Developer Paul discuss Phantasma’s Roadmap
Adapt, Pivot & Accelerate!
Blockchain technology, its use cases, peripheral technologies tying into it and demographic characteristics of its user base are all constantly evolving. To adapt, we pivot and accelerate forward – we don’t get bogged down in yesterday’s news.
On that note, and in line with the heavy focus on maintaining secure services, the Phantasma contributors have pivoted on the question of bridges. Taking into account external advice, research done by multiple contributors and the result of an extensive internal review process, the contributors have decided to pursue integration with a 3rd party bridge provider specializing in secure bridge solutions and nothing else. With blockchain bridges being a prime target for malicious actors, Phantasma’s agile contributor group should not be focused on maintaining and improving bridge solutions, but rather maximize the security and functionality of the core platform, the Phantasma mainnet.
The main focus of the Phantasma contributors beyond security is to minimize the threshold for adoption. This is done through tooling, documentation, familiarity in the user experience and much more. While Phantasma’s documentation has improved significantly over the last year we recognize that there are still gaps to fill, more sample code to include and test contracts to share. To take the documentation to the next level, a task force has been created among the contributors, some of which are developers working with projects deploying their products on Phantasma. Having gone through the building process starting from scratch, they are supremely well equipped to identify the optimization potential and help make the journey as smooth as possible for those following in their footsteps.
Familiar, warm & fuzzy DEX
Familiarity in user experience is a major factor for adoption. This applies to end users, but perhaps even more so for developers. Serve up the same function calls, the same logic and the same integration pathways that they are used to, and it suddenly becomes an easy and logical choice to dive in and utilize the collection of advanced features that makes Phantasma stand out in the crowd.
Decentralized exchanges are a core part of this subject matter, and the contributor group has voted to transcode the extensively battle tested Uniswap backbone so that any EVM developer poking around will get that warm and fuzzy “I know this!” feeling. As all things are connected, this will also be tied to another tool revolutionizing the ease with which EVM developers can port their projects to Phantasma: A Solidity to TOMB transpiler, aiming to enable Solidity developers to slap their EVM code into the transpiler and get fresh, deployable Phantasma code in return!
The contributors realize that this means that a fair bit of time has been spent building internal bridge and DEX knowledge while working on in-house products that will not see the light of day, but expect that this will be more than made up for by the drastic decrease in expected technical overhead – a significant advantage that follows using multi audited, thoroughly battle tested solutions.
AI – Your New Best Friend!
It’s one thing to have solid documentation and robust Software Development Kits, but sometimes you just need that extra hand or someone to discuss your ideas with. This is what triggered Phantasma’s AI pivot over the recent months. With Specky coming to life as our resident AI assistant developers can get guidance 24/7, customized contract suggestions, advice on anything from basic function calls to project design.
With a technical support wizard that never sleeps, never charges by the hour, and who just wants to get your project deployed on Phantasma, project developers are already finding him to be a great asset and colleague! As an added bonus, this frees up even more core developer time to focus on their main tasks, including the most recent hires.
Business Development – Up, Up & Away
While these processes have been going on, the business development contributors have been busy meeting with projects wishing to develop products on our chain. The busdev contributors are pleased to report that a number of new projects have started developing their products on Phantasma over the last six months, these are all in various stages of development – some of them have been announced, others have not (yet).
Game developers and gamers have historically been rather critical of blockchain and crypto in general, which has resulted in a lower than expected uptake. The busdev contributors have recently noticed a change in attitude, making them believe that the huge gaming market will increasingly start making use of blockchain technology.
A major advantage of Phantasma over other blockchains is that in the gaming space, many games are being developed on Unity which uses the C# programming language. It has been the vision of the founder of Phantasma, Sergio Flores, to develop a blockchain which makes it easy for those who are developing using C# to integrate. To that end, the entire core blockchain was written in C#, and even the TOMB smart contract compiler is C# based.
Given Phantasma’s unique position in both programming language, the unique features and benefits of its smart NFT technology and the low cost transaction fees, Phantasma is in a great position to benefit from this change in attitude.
The Roadmap & Development Town Hall
In sum, the contributors are confident that the strategic rethink that has taken place over the past few months will give Phantasma the best possible position from which to attract more projects and make Phantasma the blockchain of (obvious) choice!
Attached below you will see the historic Phantasma Evolutions, as well as the new, dynamic Phantasma Roadmap. Make sure you don’t miss the Roadmap & Development Town Hall with Senior Developer Paul West at Phantasma’s Discord server on Friday, September 29th at 5pm UTC – ask ALL your roadmap questions and experience his unique blend of honesty and brilliance!
The Phantasma Contributors
