Dear SOULdiers,

After the implemented earlier this autumn, the team transitioned to more tightly scoped development sprints. Our previous implementation of six months’ worth of hard work included delivering , a massive , dozens and dozens of tasks surrounding measures to future proof the Phantasma blockchain — and a large collection of minor and major bug fixes to improve user experience.

However, there were some tasks left before we were satisfied and ready to declare that Phantasma had reached its 2.0 turning point — which is what gave birth to the current development sprint nicknamed “Audi”.

Completing the puzzle

The Audi sprint included crucial tasks that we wanted to complete as quickly as possible to ensure that all areas of the blockchain matched the massive improvements to interoperability, functionality and general performance delivered on October 1st this year. This included releasing Phantasma’s with full support for deployment of custom smart contracts on Phantasma, multiple upgrades to our capabilities, chain storage and synchronization upgrades and more.

As is often the case, optimizations in one area can trigger a desire to add another piece of the puzzle, and another — to the point where the entire puzzle has been completed. And indeed, the scope of the Audi sprint was expanded along the way to include the final pieces of the puzzle that we wanted to complete to be able to confidently state that Phantasma has reached the next level!

Smart NFTs

While Phantasma’s NFT technology was second to none based on the built-in capabilities when the Phantasma mainnet launched back in October 2019, these capabilities have been significantly expanded to a point where we have achieved truly .

A lot of work has been done at a core chain level to enhance native NFT capabilities and upgrade the associated APIs. This includes becoming the world’s first blockchain to natively support multi asset infusion. As a result of this achievement developers, artists and regular users can now infuse not just a single asset, but multiple assets including other Non Fungible Tokens — at the same time — into a Phantasma Smart NFT.

Infusing NFTs into NFTs — InceptioNFT?

Furthermore our NFT standard has been upgraded and built out to completeness, SOUL staking requirements for immutable on-chain NFT data storage have been implemented, and multiple new endpoints have been added to our APIs to enable fetching the relevant NFT data from the chain. To enable maximum utilization of the chain storage allocation we have introduced a separation between duplicated and unique NFT data. In duplicated mode the ROM contents is stored on the series itself while the NFTs still differ in mint number and NFT ID, and thus they take up virtually no storage space no matter how many are minted. In unique mode, the contents is stored in each unique NFT, but they can still be tied together as a series. Throughout this process, extensive testing has been performed to ensure complete compatibility with existing 22 Racing Series NFTs.

In sum, Phantasma has upgraded the blockchain technology field’s capabilities to include truly Smart NFTs.

TOMB Smart Contract Compiler

, extremely user friendly and based mainly on C#, has now officially been released. TOMB brings easily deployable custom smart contracts to Phantasma, which massively decreases developer threshold for onboarding. In combination with the upgraded developer documentation (to be released shortly), we aim to make the introduction to — and use of — Phantasma as pleasurable and pain free as possible for new developers curious about the expansive suite of functionality that our blockchain offers.

Visit the TOMB Github repository to learn more about our Phantasma smart contract compiler

In parallel with our work on the TOMB compiler, we have been upgrading our smart contract deployment procedure and enabled on-chain contract method upgrade functionality. Taken together, these changes represent a massive upgrade for external developers, and are expected to increase our attractiveness and the onboarding of new dApp developers to the Phantasma ecosystem.

Store and Explore

Our storage functionality has also been significantly optimized, and as part of the Audi sprint we have implemented self growing storage partitions across block producers along with storage interop calls and further improvements to storage synchronization between nodes. As a part of these improvements we have now also enabled end-user utilization of their storage quotas earned by staking SOUL. This means that you can now store your most important files encrypted using Phantasma’s native decentralized storage through Poltergeist v2.0’s UI.

Multiple enhancements have been made to the explorer

Our has also been receiving some well deserved love, including smart contract support, enabling viewing of token contract methods, listing infuse events and various stability and performance enhancements.

Tokenomics — Burn baby, burn — New rewards!

Deflationary measures are an integral part of KCAL’s tokenomics, and multiple measures have been planned for implementation. Ever since our initial mainnet launch, a minor portion of KCAL transaction fees have been burned as a test of chain economics. With Phantasma 2.0 we are now unlocking the full automatic burning of 50% of the KCAL fees for every single transaction on the chain. Additional deflationary measures are now also in place — with even more to follow. With the Audi sprint we have increased the cost of smart contract deployment and token creation, which serves as a combined deflationary and anti spam measure. The initial smart contract deployment cost has been set to $10 worth of KCAL, while initial token creation costs $100 worth of KCAL. These values are adjusted automatically through our built-in oracles as token values change.

KCAL is expected to see significant increase in both usage and burn rate following the upgrades

The team has, after careful consideration, also decided to implement a new type of reward for the most loyal, significant SOUL holders. From here on out, 10% of the annual 3% SOUL inflation will be allocated to Soul Masters staking 50k SOUL or more for 3 consecutive months. In addition, 25% of KCAL fees for all transactions happening on the chain will henceforth be redirected to the rewards pool unless a dApp developer smart contract specifically requires this portion of the fees as payment to the dApp provider. This will at the same time decrease block producer KCAL rewards for such transactions from 50% to 25% of the total KCAL fees. Each three month period will coincide with the time points triggering block producer and Phantom Force fund minting, with its starting point based on three month intervals starting from the original Genesis block.

CROWN — only for the most loyal Soul Masters

Showcasing our Smart NFT functionality, and with all calculations and distributions performed automatically on the chain, these rewards will be automatically infused into a new type of NFTs called CROWN. These NFTs will then be distributed through a smart contract trigger to all eligible long term Soul Master loyalists.

Ecto wallet matures!

Our browser extension Metamask-like wallet for Chromium-based browsers is maturing and has received multiple upgrades through the Audi sprint. Instead of import only you can now create new wallets in Ecto, while the import procedure has seen a revamp with implementation of improved checks as well as support for HEX format private keys. Currencies and pricing data has been upgraded, including live KCAL values straight from API.

With the heavy focus on Phantasma’s NFT capabilities in the Audi sprint, Ecto’s NFT handling logic has been reworked to fully support the upgraded Phantasma NFT standard — including full support for the new GHOST and CROWN types of NFTs. NFT infusion events are now visible in the activity tab, and users can view NFTs infused into other NFTs (nested NFTs).

In addition, improvements to Ecto dApp support were implemented and Ecto now supports configuring your Phantasma wallet’s unique on-chain name. Finally, support was added for switching between various networks (mainnet / testnet / simnet), and a series of minor bugs were fixed.

Of course there is more

While these massive upgrades are the main functionality enhancements delivered through the Audi sprint, multiple additional bug fixes and feature improvements also managed to sneak into the scope of the current sprint.

  • Our swiss army knife, the fully featured multi node and API tool , has received multiple enhancements as part of the smart contract and token creation upgrades
  • In addition to our multiple private networks we have now deployed an official Phantasma Testnet for use by the team and external developers
  • Our dApp connector Phantasma Link has received support for the C# programming language
  • Various node related DNS issues were resolved
  • A potential block producer slow synchronization issue on restart was fixed
  • A handful of fringe swap issues have been corrected
  • Half a gazillion unit tests have been added to complement the new code
  • Major updates to the Poltergeist wallet ()

The future is here,

The Phantasma Team