Thank you both for your replies. Good project, hopefully it goes the distance! Will be researching this a little more before a purchase.
NP
FWIW below are some random / unorganized quotes from devs and community members I’ve collected. They aren’t nec my own opinions, but they provide a rough understanding of what SHIFT’s up to I think.
—Phantom is the flagship "product" (I guess you could call it a dApp) but I don't believe the primary purpose is to act as an SDK. The primary purpose is to act as the gateway to the Shift network. Shift's focus is decentralized hosting and Lisk's focus is dapps and sidechains, although since they're based on the same codebase, in theory they could each do both. … the teams have different focuses and different goals. Shift and Lisk have contributed to each other to make the codebase the better in the past, it's not really a competition. … Shift is focused on decentralized hosting and is not a direct competitor with Eth. Also a big differentiation is the use of IPFS, which I don't think has been done before in crypto.
—Decentralized Web (like maidsafe), + decentralized storage (like siacoin), + decentralized smarts contracts (like ethereum and lisk), all in one, but the first to implement IPFS in a really successful way, there are many other features
—If we don’t encounter too big bumps in the road, we will release a first version of Phantom at the end of Q2 on testnet!!
—Hosting websites at servers, p2p connected
—Shift is kind of like maid, only without encryption and tor, but it will be available under normal DNS, so shift will be better for adoption. The other 'competitors' ignore the fact that over half the webs traffic is mobile also. Shifts scalablity is huge using lisk codebase, nothing else could really be more perfect for a decentralized internet solution in my opinion.
—Decentralized hosting solution in parallel of a decentralized application platform. With IPFS, you can pin content that you want to see hosted forever … the blooming of Web 3.0 with an ecosystem built in from the get go, which SHIFT is the spearhead of. No single point of failure, freedom of creation, built-in payment system.
—An easy way to describe it is that we are trying to build a parallel Internet for decentralized content distribution.