Phore (PHR) is a scalable, secure, and flexible platform being built to empower individuals, businesses, and the cryptocurrency industry. Alongside this, a decentralized application ecosystem is being created in order to challenge industries in which users are suffering as a direct result of centralization. Ecommerce and crowdfunding are two examples of industries being challenged by Phore, where centralization has lead to huge problems such as mass censorship and significant data leaks. The Phore Decentralized Marketplace already allows for free commerce of physical or virtual goods and services, and will soon have support for Cryptocurrency trading. Design has begun to support fully peer to peer, decentralized and censorship-resistant crowdfunding, as one of the next major additions to Phore's suite of cryptocurrency-powered end-user applications. In 2017, Phore delivered their blockchain which supports fast, secure transactions, passive income through staking and masternodes and has since added many features which make cryptocurrencies easier to use. Phore was the first project to ever implement SegWit when using a 100% Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm with Masternodes, improving both transaction security and scalability. Phore’s current architecture allows anyone in their community to participate in securing the Phore network by staking or hosting Masternodes. Masternode owners have the ability to vote on budget proposals using the fully decentralized governance system, thus meaning the Phore team is fully accountable and that no single entity can manipulate the future of the project. 2019 will see the release of (and migration to) the next-generation architecture, Phore Synapse. This revolutionary architecture makes use of Sharding technology and will have a theoretical capacity to process hundreds of thousands of transactions per second, support high performance execution of fully Turing-complete smart contracts to support complex decentralized applications (dApps) and business models, and allow the creation of customized shards that are optimized for different use cases while allowing full inter-operability between shards. The Phore Synapse Sharding architecture will also feature a fully decentralized governance system, though with extended capabilities, allowing much broader participation from the community with Synapse Masternodes that will have much lower collateral requirements and will also take on the staking functions, which is not currently possible with traditional Masternodes. Phore Synapse will allow Synapse Masternode owners to run their nodes whilst storing PHR offline / in cold storage, such as on hardware wallets. Unlike Phore’s current architecture which uses the PoS 3.0 consensus algorithm, Phore Synapse will make use of the CASPER algorithm which will enhance security by helping blocks become finalized more quickly, will solve known issues with previous PoS algorithms such as the nothing-at-stake problem, and will increase performance by supporting BLS aggregation signatures that vastly reduces block processing and validation. The Phore Blockchain team are developing Phore Synapse using Golang. The development has been getting significant interest from other projects, including Prysmatic Labs, one of the teams working on Ethereum 2.0, who have suggested they will be using some of Phore’s code in Ethereum 2.0. Phore Blockchain fully believes in the decentralized, open-source development model, and embraces partnerships with other projects where we can work together to make the industry stronger. Phore Synapse will feature some truly unique innovations, which the Phore team believe make the architecture truly superior to any other within the crypto industry, the most prominent of which is the ability to design and build customized blockchain shards that are optimized for specific use cases and can each have different capabilities. The Synapse architecture will allow for new shard types to be added dynamically by making use of the decentralized governance system to approve them rather than requiring users to frequently upgrade to each feature, which removes both barriers and complexity for Phore users. Using these features, special-purpose shard types can be added to have different shards that are optimized for speed, size, dApps, secure transfers, governance, identity, privacy, and many other specialized use cases, along with the ability to inter-operate across all of the shards as users traverse the platform.