Our team of developers has now settled into our new office and in this past week, having verified the existing code, has made a plan for the next few months regarding the development of the Opus platform and the demo version that is already online.

We are very proud to be one of the world’s first startups which went into the fundraising stage with a ready-made demo based on the blockchain to show to the world. We have noticed that an increasing amount of companies are using this approach, and we consider it a privilege to set standards in this competitive industry.

Our plan is meant to be a framework for the development and will ensure that the development will go smoothly; however, nothing is set in stone. It was decided that the Agile software development method will work best for this project, which means that specific dates are more guidelines than deadlines, and it will allow our team to adapt better to changing situations, effectively shortening the development time by making the work more efficient.

Since moving into the office, we have been busy with setting up the development. Our developers are finalizing the choice and configuration of the environment in which they will feel most comfortable, and creating a skeleton for the code of the web app and the application programming interface (API). This has prepared us to move onto the file upload on our web app. We have broken the development of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) down into four sections:

File upload (December 2017 — January 2018)

This is a somewhat shorter section and should take over a week to finish. This part includes developing the tool for artists to upload their music, and figuring out the formats for the files and their prices. This section is followed by a checkpoint, wherein the work that has been completed up until this point is thoroughly tested and any bugs or errors are eliminated.

Displaying the music on the web player (January 2018)

This part involves creating the base for the layout on the web app and making a list of the files that have been uploaded by the artist. As in the previous section, a checkpoint will follow this to test the code.

Playing tracks on a demo version (January 2018 — February 2018)

This is the longest section in the development of the MVP. The main points here are coming up with an algorithm for users to be able to listen to music on the demo version, streaming tracks online, and downloading tracks locally which users will be able to open at their convenience. The last two points in this section are the most time consuming. As in the preceding sections, this will also be tested extensively before proceeding to the next part.

Purchasing tracks (February 2018)

This section consists of developing an administration panel for the user to be able to purchase tracks, completing transactions using smart contracts, and building the system for users to log in and access the database. Again, this is followed by a checkpoint to ensure everything is on track.

Next steps

This concludes the development of the MVP and the plans for the next couple of months. Following this, our team of developers will continue developing solid foundations based on the blockchain, decentralized file system and API, combining all elements of the platform driving the web and mobile players. This should take a few more months to finish.

This is, of course, an indicative outline. We have planned the majority of the development quite far in advance; however, we will be releasing more details of the further stages once we are certain we can keep to our plan, and there will be regular development updates every two weeks where we will also briefly outline our plans for the immediate future.

We encourage everyone in our community to send us any questions about Opus you may have and if we collect enough of these, we will host a video Q&A session with the developers from our office in Gdansk.

You can reach us on Discord, Telegram, Facebook, Twitter, or via email at info@opus-foundation.org.