Happy New Year from the Opacity team! As we enter 2019, we wanted to give the community a high-level update on the project and give a preview of what’s to come later this year.

Upcoming Areas of Focus

The Opacity team is currently in the process of updating the Oyster whitepaper to both reflect Opacity’s vision for the project, as well as making the whitepaper more accessible. Though very detailed, the original Oyster whitepaper had a strong focus on the technicality of the project, with less focus on the readability of the whitepaper. The updated Opacity whitepaper will provide a strong level of technical detail regarding the project and will also ensure that the information provided is accessible to a much larger user base. We will update the community and post a link to the whitepaper on the Opacity website once the whitepaper is prepared.

In line with the updated whitepaper, the team will be spending significant time over the next month looking at potential architectural or structural tweaks for the platform. We see this as an opportunity to potentially improve upon some items we were beholden in our prior form. We hope to have significantly more detail to provide in our next update around these items.

Development Update

The team is in the final stage of Quality Assurance (QA) testing for the monetized storage platform. We have been making performance, code efficiency, and UI improvements to make everything more streamlined.

Our initial priority has been re-establishing the baseline system from Oyster which included removing references to Oyster and reinstalling the servers for Opacity, reinstalling Opacity.ixi (Iota plug-in) on all the backend servers, renaming files and variables in the backend code, among many other things that were required to complete the code fork transition. We have also partially enabled our Travis builds, which is our continuous integration pipeline that streamlines testing and deployment to help deliver faster and maintain quality.

Following the baseline setup, focusing on monetization changes has been the bulk of the backend conversion. We stripped out logic that won’t be needed for our simplified payment system and repeatedly tested and fixed issues as they were found, such as updating dependencies. We no longer need to store completed genesis hashes due to the removal of the webnodes, no longer store treasures since we aren’t burying treasures, and are no longer holding onto the session and the ethereum transactions once they are complete. Additionally, we changed the payment logic in the brokers. Instead of a split transaction to each broker, each broker is alpha roughly half the time, so each broker will get the chance to receive full payment roughly half the time, which is more efficient to handle payments.

To help with performance, our new Iota instances separate broker from IRI, which has seemed to improve upload times during internal testing.

Finally, we have created a comprehensive Opacity Storage Terms of Service and Privacy Policy to clarify our use of data and firm stance in preserving user anonymity.

Payments

Monetization of the system has been introduced in order address any utility concerns with the Opacity OPQ token — accepting payment for storage will solidify the utility use case. Initially, each upload cost is set at .015625 OPQ, which equals 1/64 OPQ. The reason for this is to respect the previously agreed 1 token = 64GB peg and 1GB is the smallest unit of storage we can provide. This payment/peg model is subject to changes as we receive feedback from users and from testing pricing models.

Budget / Forecast Update

See below for an update regarding our spending for December. We are still in the process of working through a few internal items but plan to have a longer-term budget released at some point later in the first quarter.

Actuals vs. Budget for December

December was under budget for the month on both Non-Headcount and Headcount-related expenses. Just as with November, a portion of resources that bill on a daily basis worked on less during the month with the holidays. Ultimately, our actuals came in approximately $14,000 (20.8%) lower than what we had initially budgeted for.

We are still in the process of working through a number of strategic planning initiatives (as part of our technology review mentioned above). While I had initially planned to provide a 1Q budget in this update, I am going to table that for the time being is this could have some significant impacts to our budgeting process.

Token Supply Update

See below for our current funding breakdown in tokens:

Opacity Wallet Overview

Website Update

As many community members are aware, the re-designed Opacity website has been released, which feature a much darker color scheme than the original Oyster colors. The darker theme and change in font was used to make Opacity more suited for corporate use. Additionally, the Opacity site and storage interface are much more cohesive in their design in comparison to the Oyster site/storage interface (a photo has been provided below displaying a preview of the Opacity web interface).

Some community members may have noticed that the new Opacity site does not contain any links to the storage interface. The Opacity storage interface is currently in the last stages of QA, and once the interface is fully prepared, links will be provided on the Opacity website. The Opacity team is very excited to showcase the new storage interface, and the team is looking forward to hearing the community response once the storage interface is made available.

New Storage Interface

Summary

Thanks for supporting the Opacity in 2018. Our team is excited about the future and we look forward to an exciting and incredibly productive 2019. As always, feel free to reach out to us in our channels listed below with any questions or feedback.