Another week has gone by, and plenty of work has been completed by the Oyster development team to prepare the Oyster protocol for its Mainnet release. Today’s announcement will be detailing the development completed during the week of April 29th — May 4th.

First, the development team continued working on the Oysterby private testnet, which including deploying the OysterPearl.sol smart contract on the private network and testing interactions with this smart contract via unit tests on the broker nodes. Additionally, the development team worked on setting up the various transaction scenarios involved in the Oyster protocol and built tests for ensuring that these scenarios are correctly handled on the Oysterby testnet. Moving forward with Oysterby, the development team will be working on finishing up the bury, claim, and send PRL functionality. Ultimately, the Oysterby testnet will prove invaluable in ensuring that the protocol is thoroughly QA’d, and ready for commercial use.

The development team has also made significant strides in completing re-architecting the way a storage user’s browser splits a file into chunks to allow for chunks containing treasure to be inserted into a data map. This portion of the protocol, as well as file upload logic in the client related to this new chunking architecture, is now undergoing QA. Furthermore, the development team has added a test suite to the web interface to help keep code quality high and reduce the likelihood of introducing bugs as developers continue to push new features.

Further progress has also been made on the broker node “modes” mentioned in our previous update, with a primary focus on implementing the “dummy” treasure mode which will allow the broker nodes to bury “dummy” treasure, enabling easier QA of the web node treasure-hunting logic. Additionally, segment logging has been added to record various events that occur on the broker node.

The team has also completed work on optimizing SQL queries used in the upload process, as well as the treasure/API endpoints on the broker node for Proof-of-Work and claiming the treasure. Furthermore, work has been done on creating the sidechain and unburying treasure from the Tangle transaction messages by attempting to decrypt the message using each sidechain link and caching that value for later. The decryption still needs QA, but the chain of actions is coming together. Finally, the development team worked on the verification process involved on the broker node endpoints when a web node sends a request communicating that the web node has found treasure.

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.