Phala Monthly Newsletter: June 2023

7 min readJul 7, 2023

Top news:

After three years of dedication and hard work, Phat Contract’s main-net launch created a massive buzz of excitement! We celebrated the occasion with a Launch Day Twitter Space featuring core members of the Phala team sharing insights and delving into our groundbreaking new product! Check out the replay here.

Alongside the Phat Contract release, we also established a refreshed brand identity solidifying our place as the trustless off-chain computation solution for web3.

As part of the Phat Contract launch, we introduced Phat Bricks, the low-code developer experience for Phat Contract that allows builders to integrate pre-made Blueprints with their smart contracts in minutes. For our first Blueprint, we joined forces with web3’s largest social graph protocol Lens to bring our powerful tooling to the SocialFi space. Phala’s LensAPI Oracle brings next-gen computation services to Lensverse Builders! Want to know more? Read here! 🌿

On the protocol level, we have officially entered a new halving period and the Budget Balancer has been successfully launched! Gemini tokenomics will now be implemented on both Phala and Khala, with the same token budget being shared across both chains. Read more about his update here!

Product and technical updates:

The integration of Sygma Bridge into SubBridge was initiated in June and has now been successfully completed. With this update, users can bid farewell to the previously burdensome 300 $PHA gas fee associated with bridging tokens on and off the Phala blockchain. The new fee has been significantly reduced to just 50 $PHA and the time it takes to bridge has been dramatically shortened. Say goodbye to high fees and embrace the improved efficiency offered by SubBridge and Sygma Bridge!

Compute:

Compute supply updates:

The Phala App experienced a significant enhancement in functionality allowing seamless access to delegation and pool data on the Phala chain directly through the Phala App. Additionally, a new slate of metrics have been incorporated to display data from both Phala and Khala, providing users with a comprehensive view of the ecosystem.

Ecosystem/growth:

Phala Builders Program:

Exciting updates have taken place regarding the Phala Builders Program, which provides funding, guidance, and support to developers that want to build high-value projects with Phat Contract, and add functionality to Phat Contract itself.

We congratulated our first alumni, Kapil Sinha, founder of PrivaDex and Koingaroo, on successful completion of his milestones. Read more about this here!

Phala’s Closed Beta, an initiative aimed to encourage and reward the efforts of talented builders fostering innovation within Phat Contract, saw eight participants gain eligibility to claim from the prize pool of 149,168 PHA ($15,449.48) as recognition for their contributions to Phat Contract. Congratulations again to all the winners!

Events:

June was an eventful month with a strong focus on hosting and attending a wide array of events both in-person and virtually. We also announced and confirmed our participation in upcoming events! Here is a recap of the happenings that made June a Phantastic month for Phat Contract:

During the Buidl Asia conference, Phala core developer Wenfeng delivered an engaging presentation on the topic of utilizing Phat Contract to build your own Oracle in our new low-code experience Phat Bricks.

Our VP of Growth Zoe and Director of Tech Evangelism Josh co-hosted a great workshop with Composable Finance at the Polkadot Summit to discuss ink! and cross-chain smart contract execution! Exciting tech discussions unfolded as we showcased the amazing off-chain capabilities of Phat Contract to DotSama developers. The session sparked brilliant use case ideas, pushing innovation to new heights!

Phala had an active presence at Polkadot Decoded, with Josh making a presentation on the power of Phat Contract. Our team co-hosted the “Opening Night” alongside partners Astar Network, Apillon, CrustNetwork, and WebZero. In addition, our Growth and Product Manager, Stu, participated in a Panel at the Polkadot Decoded Viewing Party in NYC!

At Decoded, we made sure to give our LensAPI Oracle the attention it deserved with three dedicated events.

Firstly, we hosted a Launch Celebration featuring two special guests from Lens Protocol: Director of DevRel Dabit and VP of Engineering Josh. Together, we introduced and discussed the immense value that the LensAPI Oracle brings to Lens Builders and much more.

For our second event, Dabit, Josh, and special guests from Polygon joined us for a technical walk-through of the LensAPI Oracle. We showcased the Blueprint’s remarkable features and functionalities, generating excitement among attendees.

Lastly, our Co-Founder Marvin and CPO Dan joined ReviseNFT and other Lens Protocol builders for a discussion on ‘Why and What are Builders Building on Lens Protocol’.

For upcoming events, Phala will be participating in the DevX Global Tour in Europe! Catch us at the Guild meetings in Kampala, Lagos, Zagreb, Amsterdam, London, Paris, Lisbon, and Berlin, both physically and virtually.

Parterships:

As mentioned above, Phala unveiled a strategic integration with Lens Protocol in June, aiming to bring valuable off-chain tools to SocialFi builders. This initiative will facilitate the swift development of robust low-code Blueprints on Phala, making the development of engaging web3 social applications easier than ever before.

We joined forces with Dmail to further the decentralised movement together. Dmail is a mail notify and message subscription-based Web3 multi-chain infrastructure that provides unified, real-time communication services across various chains and applications.

Content:

Here are some key pieces of content Phala published in June:

Explore and discover Phat Contract’s key functionalities in this blog.

Josh released his first tutorial for #ThePhatDevShow. In this episode, he walkthrough covering Astar’s Swanky Phala plugin, installing the Swanky Phala plugin, initialising a new Phat Contract, compiling and deploying the Phat Contract in a cluster and much more!

See the LensAPI Oracle Blueprint in action with this informative deployment demo by Phala’s Growth and Product Manager, Stu.

Governance:

The Khala Treasury accumulated 46.67 million $PHA, and saw 5 governance referenda and 3 new treasury proposals take place in June. Check out the full lists of both on our Referenda and Treasury pages.

💫 Democracy Referendums:

#103: Proposal for nominating Doyle as a Khala Registrar.

#104: Open Khala -> Picasso Network HRMP & Register PICA on Khala.

#105: Accept HRMP channel from Picasso.

#106: Khala Runtime Upgrade v1250.

#107: Move 500K PHA from ChainBridge to Sygma Bridge.

💫 Treasury Proposals:

#74: Closed Beta Rewards Application — 206,547.558 PHA

#75: Phala at Korea Blockchain Week from June 1st to 10th — 62,881 PHA

#76: SubQuery Managed Service Solution (Q2, 2023) — 11,900 PHA

More details can be found on https://khala.subsquare.io/.

Community:

Our CPO, Dan, showcased the immense potential of Phat Contract at the June Polkadot community call, emphasizing its value within the Dotsama ecosystem and beyond.
Stu and Dan hosted our monthly community call, discussing the successful launch of Phat Contract and the positive reception of the LensAPI Oracle, among other exciting topics.
We have seen a substantial amount of user-generated content from our Phamily, which is Phantastic. We found the following Twitter threads, which centered around our LensAPI Oracle, particularly impressive and worth sharing:

About Phala

Phala Network is a decentralized cloud that offers secure and scalable computing for Web3.

With Phat Contracts, an innovative programming model enabling trustless off-chain computation, developers can create new Web3 use cases.

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