Blockchain Killer PHANTOM Protocol in Works

This week PhD candidate Yonatan Sompolinsky and Dr. Aviv Zohar from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have released a document on new scalable protocol named PHANTOM for BlockDAG, a network structure alternative to Blockchain.

The Sompolinsky and Zohar’s research dated 2013 presented a BlockDAG that modifies dramatically Blockchain structure into a treelike one for safer and faster transactions.

In November 2017 at “Blockchain in Berkeley” Sompolinsky described BlockDAG structure as the one maintaining service for all net users at once. This stands out against Blockchain where new blocks are added one-by-one as soon as they get checked.

The PHANTOM document has got SPECTER protocol at its basis which verifies transactions with recursive voting of previous blocks. Unlike SPECTER however, PHANTOM is going to employ “greedy algorithm” in BlockDAG to create more linear block structure by separating blocks processed by “honest nodes” from those mined by non-interactive DAG-protocol-violating nodes.

The PHANTOM linear structure implies increased confirmation time though the paper considers combining the two protocols to make the best of both worlds.

New tokens have already been issued at BlockDAG protocol. Byteball is a DAG-based currency with interconnected transactions containing hash of the previous ones. IOTA is DAG-built as well and new transaction here must check at least the two previous ones.