Oyster Pearl (PRL) Combines IOTA Tangle with Ethereum Blockchain
For those of you not familiar with the Oyster Pearl project, it aims to combine the directed acyclic graph (DAG) technology of IOTA with the blockchain smart contract technology of Ethereum. From the whitepaper, the goal of the project is:
The Oyster Protocol enables websites to silently generate traffic revenue as visitors perform Proof of Work for a decentralized storage ledger
In other words, this gives websites an alternate way to generate revenue than using ads. No one likes ads, they distract from the content of websites and ad blockers are becoming more and more common. The Oyster protocol provides an alternative solution to this problem by allowing website visitors to contribute a portion of their CPU and GPU power to allow users’ files to be stored on a decentralized and anonymous ledger. They take a very unique approach in this and in incentivizing users to maintain the network.
IOTA Tangle
Nodes with the Oyster network use the Tangle as a neutral third party to negotiate work performance, completion, and compensation. Data uploaded via oyster is ultimately retained across the distributed network topology of the Tangle. This ensures that the data is securely stored in a decentralized manner that exhibits great redundancy and failure resistance.
Ethereum Blockchain
The Oyster Pearl (PRL) token is an ERC20 token that exhibits unique qualities that are built upon the smart contract framework of Ethereum. Oyster nodes hunt for Pearls that are embedded accress file data structures that are retained on the Tangle. As the nodes search for Pearls via Proof of Work, they help maintain the data on the Tangle, therefor securing its retention. The Oyster smart contract only allows Pearls to be gradually released from their embedded state, therefore guaranteeing the data’s integrity for the correct amount of time.
My 2 cents
I have tried to remain largely unbiased so far. This is a very ambitious project and could be quite impressive if the team can pull off what they have outlined in their whitepaper. This project has a test net that is supposed to come out in Q1 2018, and it could really take off from there. It’s still at a relatively low market cap of ~$40mm (I believe Coinmarketcap has the incorrect circulating supply listed, it should be 62,366,927). Compared to similar projects like Sia ($930 mm), FCT ($540 mm) or even BAT ($560 mm), it certainly has room to grow. I think a large part of the reason why it hasn’t hit the first page of Coinmarketcap yet is that people are hesitant to see how the test net looks. It’s still in high risk, high reward territory, but the whitepaper was very well written, so I think this project has potential.
I recommend reading the whitepaper if you want to learn more about the project. The whitepaper is a very interesting read: https://oyster.ws/OysterWhitepaper.pdf