With the completion of our token crowdsale, we at Opus are back at the development of our platform. Here are some updates of our progress for this week:

Token

In response to suggestions from our community, the team made the decision to burn foundation tokens in proportion to the amount of tokens sold in the crowdsale. Earlier this week we successfully executed the token burn, in which 584 million foundation tokens were burnt. For more detailed information check out our previous blog post.

Another step we will take in terms of tokens is the token lock-up. The team have decided to lock up 95% of the foundation tokens (after the burn) for 1 year. To enforce the lock-up, within the next 2 weeks we will deploy a token-lock smart contract on ethereum and send 95% of the foundation tokens to the contract. During the lock-up period, no one, including the team, will be able to access the locked tokens.

Token lockup smart contract sample code

Development

The development of our website and mobile applications are underway.

Our working progress of the past week includes:

UI

At Opus our goal is to disrupt the centralized and abusive music industry, an important step of which is to capture the mainstream audience. This cannot be done without a well-designed user interface that frees users of the confusion and hassle common to existing blockchain products, and instead offers them an intuitive and seamless user-experience. Therefore, UI/UX is one of our team’s main foci.

To that end, we have put great efforts into the UI design for both our web and mobile applications. The efforts continue as the development team proceeds to implement the interfaces. We hope to finish the implementation within this quarter.

Artist upload system

On the back-end, we are building upon our existing demo to develop a system for artists to upload and manage their music tracks. Tracks will be encrypted and uploaded to IPFS, while metadata of the tracks will be registered on smart contracts. Artists will be able to manage details of their music, including pricing and payment distribution.

Additionally, a critical concern is the possibility of users uploading copyright-infringing tracks to our platform. Such infringement would damage the interests of artists, whom we set out to benefit and protect. In order to build a healthy and fair ecosystem, we plan to implement an automatic content identification (audio-fingerprinting) system to prevent the uploads of copyright-infringing content.

Web interface for token wallet

In order for users to interact with OPT tokens (e.g. using OPT to purchase music), there are 2 solutions: either via a geth/parity based local wallet software, or via a web wallet interface that connects to the ethereum blockchain through RPC calls to a server node, similar to myetherwallet. The downside with the first option is the long time needed for nodes syncing, which may be a confusing and frustration factor for potential mainstream users. Therefore in order to ensure better user experience, the team has set out to develop a web interface that allows users to interact with their tokens, with no delay caused by node syncing.

For business inquiries, artists, issues, and support, just shoot us an email at info@opus-foundation.org