As promised in our previous post, we are releasing our first technical update on the Oyster Mainnet progress. Below, we will outline some of the aspects the development team is currently working on to prepare the Mainnet for its release on May 29th.

We are using the Truffle and Ganache suites to get Ethereum and ERC20 transfer events working on the Golang broker nodes. Additionally, we are in the process of performing QA tests on the treasure hunting logic used within the protocol. Once transfer events are working on the broker nodes, and the treasure hunting logic has been thoroughly tested, the development team will begin testing the PRL burying mechanisms.

Several other infrastructure improvements are currently in the works, including a change in the order of logic involved in processing chunks of data client-side to support treasure-containing data chunks on the Tangle. Before, the order of logic involved was to encrypt the entire file, then chunk that file and send the chunks to the broker nodes. Now, the file is chunked first, then each chunk is encrypted individually and sent to the broker nodes.

The development team also added several modes to the broker nodes so that broker nodes can quickly switch between uploads with treasure, uploads without treasure, and uploads with “dummy” treasure. This functionality was added to increase the efficiency of QA testing.

The development team has also made significant progress on the file upload/download speeds of the Oyster protocol. The team has solved some bulk insert issues, leading to the system being more scalable overall. Additionally, the team is working on the encryption schemes of IOTA transactions to maximize the amount of information that can be stored per transaction. Furthermore, the team has written custom methods for the IOTA IXI that allow for much faster and lighter downloads on our private Tangle, as well as made significant changes to the Oyster Storage download wrapper that have drastically increased download speed (see graphic below). Finally, the team has been working on preparing streamlined uploads to the broker nodes, which will have a significant increase on upload speeds once completed.

Preliminary test results from a development branch of the Oyster Storage download wrapper improvements. Actual speed improvements from the upcoming oysterstorage.com refresh are expected to be even faster than results displayed above.

In addition to the great progress that development team has made this week, we are happy to welcome Astor Rivera as a full-time developer to the Oyster development team. Astor is well-versed in the field of software engineering and his experience with multiple blockchain platforms and technologies will prove invaluable to the Oyster development team. Since joining, Astor has been instrumental in improving our development cycle with the Ethereum platform. He is currently setting up our internal chain testnet called “Oysterby” and working with the team on the most efficient methods of PRL distribution.

We will continue to update the community on Mainnet progress every week leading up to the launch date of May 29th. Any questions or comments are encouraged to be posted to our Reddit, or Telegram channel.