Hi 
from the Prosopo team, dedicated builders on the Polkadot network.
We are looking for feedback on our upcoming treasury proposal to create a SCALE encoder for PHP. The outline and our motivations are listed below. A full proposal document will follow once we receive any community feedback.
Substrate uses a lightweight and efficient encoding and decoding program to optimize how data is sent and received over the network. The program used to serialize and deserialize data is called the SCALE codec, with SCALE being an acronym for Simple Concatenated Aggregate Little-Endian.
PHP is used by approximately 77% of websites worldwide, yet there is no PHP implementation of the SCALE codec. Development of this is crucial for expanding the interoperability of Substrate blockchains, enabling plugin development for the major CMS platforms such as WordPress and Adobe Commerce (Formerly Magento).
Prosopo has a desire to integrate our main product, Procaptcha, with WordPress and other CMS platforms, but the lack of a PHP SCALE codec is a blocker. Currently, it is not possible to decode SCALE encoded data in PHP without calling code written in another language.
By writing a PHP SCALE codec, we will be expanding the reach of Substrate and Polkadot to a much wider audience by enabling communication with substrate nodes from the most commonly used server-side language in the world.
The proposal will be in the small spender track (<=10,000 DOT) but we haven’t yet finalised the cost estimate.
Please ask any questions or respond with comments and we’ll be quick to respond! 