The new PHANTOM Protocol will become a competitor to Lightning Network

The creators of the protocols of the SPECTRE and GHOST Jonathan Sompolinsky and Aviv Zohar, described the new Protocol in a paper published this week. Protocol PHANTOM promises reliable confirmation of transactions "with any network bandwidth" and include smart contracts. The new development is based on a previous solution from the same team, SPECTRE, which departs from the traditional bitcoin block structure and uses more scalable "directed block acyclic graphs" (blockDAG). The researchers describe the technology as"Satoshi chain generalization, which is better suited for a system of fast or large blocks".

Unlike Lightning Network off-line solutions, when transactions are made in an over-built network, Phantom offers an on-line solution that allows you to leave all transaction data on the blockchain.

According to the authors, the main distinguishing feature of the PHANTOM is that it makes possible linear ordering of blocks, which did not allow the SPECTRE. To do this, it uses a "greedy algorithm" on the blockDAG platform and distinguishes blocks generated by "honest" nodes from "non-cooperating" nodes that deviate from the mining Protocol. As developers write, this distinction allows all "honest nodes" to reach consensus. The solution of a linear order allows the PHANTOM to scale any computation, including smart contracts.

Sompolinsky and Zohar acknowledge that, for the sake of linear ordering, PHANTOM sacrificed the transaction confirmation rate that was higher in the earlier SPECTRE Protocol. But the researchers are going to solve this problem in the future.