Exchange Update

Oyster would like to restate that PRL will be listed on Coinsuper during the week of July 9th, 2018. The initial trading pair will be PRL/BTC.

Furthermore, PRL is now available for trading on COSS, with PRL/BTC and PRL/ETH as the available pairs.

Development Update

Today’s update will focus on the work completed between July 1st — July 6th, 2018.

This week, the development team finished up treasure index hashing. The treasure index of a sector is now chosen by hashing the average of the indexes selected by the alpha and beta node. The hash ensures that the treasure index is genuinely random within the sector. In addition to the hashing function, the index selection method now supports variable sector size and has guards to ensure the treasure index is valid. The team has also started working on production database migrations.

Additionally, the team continued to QA ETH/PRL transactions triggered by the broker node, made small fixes, and updated unit tests. The development team is now at a stage where they can test the web node ability to claim real PRL on the Ethereum mainnet successfully. For example, this transaction was the result of a web node submitting a claim to a broker node: https://etherscan.io/tx/0x73dd4c3a2b7d1daa14c0c2a8bc92f9daffc98256e89bc0ee46d784d4aa30e8a0.

The team completed QA on the BadgerDB integration, as well as cleaning up some issues with the unit tests for the broker nodes. Furthermore, the team has been working diligently on fixing Code Climate issues, ultimately leading to a more standardized code base. By using Code Climate, the team can set coding standards for engineers to help keep the code base healthy while the team grows. The team has also been looking into tooling to help engineers configure and setup testing/staging environments efficiently and reliably so that the QA process is more automated and easier to perform.

In addition to the above improvements, the team is finishing up integrating streams for file uploads and will begin working on streams for file downloads. This is intended to allow users to upload or download large files in the browser while being memory efficient. Finally, the team worked on upgrading the web node from Webpack 3 to Webpack 4 and all dependent development libraries to the latest versions and worked on porting to and installing Typescript on the web node. Typescript will allow for strongly-typed JavaScript (i.e., explicitly declaring a variable type as a string, integer, etc.), which will improve Oyster’s coding standards and enhance security within the code base.

Development Goals for the Following Week

Below are a few of the improvements the Oyster development team will be working on in the following week

1. Continued focus on size/speed improvements

2. First design steps of a public api/client lib — the Oyster development team believes an API that other people can consume is needed for adoption. This will be a building block for how everyone, including Oyster’s internal services, upload data and also a building block for higher level wrappers. The team believes in the future the bulk of our storage will come from API users, not necessarily Oyster’s official storage interface.

3. Continue improving development tooling/process — cleaner code, more code coverage with testing, more end-to-end tests.

As always, we encourage our community to post any questions or comments regarding these development updates to our Reddit or Telegram channel.