DEVELOPMENT UPDATE NOV 9 | New Website, New Look & Roadmap

Hi SHIFT community,

a few weeks have passed and things have settled down. Today, we wanted to give you a little overview of where
we have come from and where we are going.

The basic idea behind Phantom was always to give users a new, resilient, secure and low cost way of sharing and
storing content. Many of you may probably not know that we already had a working alpha release for this in public
testing on our legacy chain before we were forced to migrate to a different codebase. Our achievements included
a custom html based dashboard that enabled users to interact with the command line interface and our custom
developed API calls to access Phantom.

Logged in, users were able to publish data on the network and register domains on our blockchain that would serve
as interpreters to direct site queries. Once published to Phantom, the data would get replicated in true peer to peer
fashion to nodes and visitors, with users serving content for other users without a single point of failure. The more
your site got visited, the more it would spread and the more resilient it would become until it was fully meshed.

After we were forced to abandon the old chain we quickly realized that this incident was a blessing in disguise. Not
only does the new codebase hold much more promise in terms of efficiency and simplicity for development, we have
also added two new team members to our development team already, which was barely possible due to the prior
restrictions of finding capable Golang developers.

During the migration we saw immensely increased interest in our project and a big influx of new users to our Slack,
which grew from a small community of 70 users to a size of now 325 community members, a lot of them active
on a daily basis, contributing to our ecosystem and helping each other.
It is also worth noting that we are already allowing users to forge on mainnet with 101 delegate spots filled
mostly by community members. All while running a stable network.

We have already contributed own security fixes to the codebase to strengthen it against potential attack
vectors and we are keeping communication with LISK very close and constant, after Max Kordek's outrwach to us.
We hope to increase our efforts in contributing to the core development of both projects and have also received a
lot of support from the LISK development team.

While official announcements from us have gotten silent, work on the new and improved Phantom release has been
progressing steadily and we are happy to say that we have an early version in private testing. While the legacy
version was based on Zeronet, we decided to use this opportunity and focus on adapting IPFS (interplanetary
filesystem) to our blockchain.

This will give us much greater capabilities for storing large amounts of data, while keeping the basic idea behind
Phantom intact. Since IPFS on its own is "merely" a file storage system, the necessary routing to find data will be
done through smart contracts on the blockchain. Attaching IPFS to blockchain has many benefits for our project,
two of the most prominent ones are incentives to store a user's data in a tiered fashion, which enables users to
pay for increased backup "depth" on a fully meshed architecture, and the ability to embed a hash of the data on
the blockchain permanently to avoid any alteration, to prove ownership or as a use for other verification like an
identity system.

While development has always been our strong side, we admit that we lack marketing. Which is why we will soon
be starting a marketing outreach, kicking off with a much improved website and blog that gives better insight into
our goals, development milestones and progress. Shortly after we will be running a social media campaign through
TVE (The Viral Exchange) to effectively increase awareness in the wider crypto community.

There is still more to come over the next days as we are currently negotiating a collaboration with a new partner
that has approached us, as well as a lot of exciting developments that have been going on behind the scenes, not
covered in this overview.

To begin all this we will be announcing our new roadmap with an estimated timeline for release dates
on Monday, the 14th, with the website launch following on Tuesday.