Phala aims to become the privacy-protection infrastructure for Web3.0, developed on Substrate and leveraging a TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) blockchain architecture to enable confidential smart contracts. It can provide privacy computing services for the Polkadot ecosystem.
Phala is the privacy computing infrastructure for Polkadot. Phala Network is a privacy computing parachain on Polkadot that, based on a proof-of-work-like economic incentive model, unleashes the privacy-preserving computational power of countless CPUs for use in Polkadots parachains, thereby serving applications such as DeFi and data services on Polkadot. Applications built on Phala, such as pLibra and Web3 Analytics, have already received grants from the Web3 Foundation.

PHA is the native functional token of the platform and serves the following purposes:
Trustworthy Computing Resources: Use PHA tokens to purchase trustworthy computing resources (such as trusted computing capacity, on-chain computation and storage resources, and off-chain storage) within the network and data exchanges.
Data Exchange Fees: Phala provides an infrastructure for data exchange based on contracts, standardizing data collection, analysis, and trading protocols. Using Phala’s protocol, it establishes a confidential yet trustworthy trading ecosystem for both buyers and sellers.
Security Assurance: Gatekeepers must stake a certain number of PHA tokens, which may be penalized for misconduct.
Governance: Holders with a certain amount of PHA can join the Phala DAO to participate in community governance.

Project Introduction

Phala Network offers cloud computing services with privacy protection, providing computing power comparable to existing cloud services while safeguarding the privacy of hosted programs.

The Phala Network consists of two types of nodes:
TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) Workers are responsible for executing encrypted contracts. TEEs and tamper-resistant processors connect in an unpermissioned manner. Most personal computers can connect to Phala and run TEE nodes. This maintains decentralization and ensures that Phala operates smoothly and remains censorship-resistant.
Gatekeepers run nodes that maintain the Phala blockchain. They must always be online to manage miners keys since key managers are required to run encrypted contracts. Gatekeepers can verify whether workers’ hardware and software remain unmodified and secure, handle worker rotation and replication factoring, and manage their state by recording inputs and outputs to maintain order without revealing content.