Over the past month, we’ve had a couple of new releases for the Phore ecosystem including the marketplace, and the blockchain API. The marketplace currently has well over 130 listings available for users to purchase and has generally been considered a success. The marketplace has increased user adoption of using Phore to exchange for “real-life goods and services”.

The Phore Marketplace

Over the next couple of months, we plan to release extensive, easy-to-use developer APIs as well as possibly some integrations into payment providers. We plan to integrate Phore into existing blockchain projects such as hardware wallets and decentralized exchanges. We will be improving our backend APIs to support the increased load of the marketplace and of the developer APIs. Finally, we’ll be implementing SegWit into Phore and some new opcodes that allow for payment channels, atomic swaps, and other more complicated “lite-smart-contracts”.

The State of SegWit

Since the release of the marketplace, I’ve been focusing mostly on the merging of upstream Bitcoin features such as SegWit. As it turns out, it’s not as simple as a merge from the PIVX upstream. Many features implemented in the Bitcoin code base are not available in PIVX or even Dash for that matter. Most of these features are generally invisible to the user, but increase the stability and reliability of the network.

Phore will implement SegWit by the end of Q2

For example, one of the many important features I was able to merge into Phore are the RPC tests. These are currently still a WIP to get them completely functioning, but they allow for higher-level tests such as a friend transacting Zerocoin with another friend, including all of the minting and spending functionality. We’ll be seeing more of these tests pulled from the Bitcoin upstream which will allow our developers to easily find bugs in Phore.

If you observe the commits in the segwit branch of our GitHub, you’ll see that major progress has been made in terms of merging upstream commits into Phore. Certainly some complications exist, for example, when minting Zerocoin from a SegWit address, but the process has generally been very simple. I pull a commit from the upstream, update it to work with Phore, and repeat. I’ve finished almost all of the major work that has to be done with SegWit and I’m now focused on testing.

How are we going to implement smart contracts?

A serious problem in most blockchains is scalability. How can we grow a decentralized ecosystem without sacrificing speed, reliability, or decentralization. Side chains are the answer to this question.

The main point is that users should only need to run applications that they care about. In this case, most users (other than master nodes) should not have to care about smart contracts at all. If someone simply wants to use Phore for privacy reasons or to simply transfer money, they should be able to do that. Smart contracts should not cause network congestion on the main chain.

To transfer between the main chain and the side chain, a 2-way-peg should be created. To transfer money from a side chain to the main chain, users can lock coins on the side chain and unlock coins on the main chain, and vice-versa for the main chain to the side chain. These transfers will be handled by master nodes. Nobody else will have to care about what happens on the sidechains, only the transfers to the sidechain and back. Finally, masternodes decide what sidechains can exist by voting on them. It will be a simple RPC command to enable or disable a sidechain. Each masternode will have to run a node for both Phore and Smart Phore, although they are not required to. We will release a document detailing our specific plans for implementation soon, although short-term, SegWit is our priority.

Conclusion

The year is an exciting time for Phore. We’ll gain the capacity needed to become a well-used crypto-currency. After which, we’ll spend time building solutions to real problems. We may develop PoS systems and allow for very simple payment and verification of micropayments for, say shopping at a store. We’ll look into emerging technologies such as VR and AR to help promote the Phore ecosystem. With all of the Facebook and Google privacy concerns, decentralization is the future and cryptocurrencies such as Phore are how we make that future a reality.