Oyster’s New CMO

As alluded to in last week’s post, we are excited to announce that Chris Garner has been hired on as the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) for Oyster. Chris has extensive experience in the ad industry which he has been active in since 2000. During this time, Chris was involved in growing the first, and most significant performance marketing company in the United Kingdom 2000–2005. Following that, he was involved in growing Germany’s most extensive performance marketing network www.affili.net in several European countries, including the United Kingdom, Belgium, France, and Holland. Furthermore, Chris helped build Australia’s most extensive performance marketing agency by working with clients such as Apple, Dell, and Expedia. In addition to Chris’ work experience, he was one of the founding members of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB)’s Performance Ad Council in which he helped author global best practice for Performance Ad Standards.

Chris on joining Oyster:

“Oyster is a firm that has the same core values as do I. Oyster engages development within the ethics of decentralization; therefore progress can be made by anyone if it conforms with protocol specifications. We are Open Source and open for business. The team has a deep empathy for an ad-free Internet that gives users choice of what Ads they choose to see or not. The development team are incredible and enabling a true revolution on the blockchain. For all of these reasons and more, I’m thrilled to join Oyster.”

Chris will bring with him two decades of experience in the performance marketing and digital ad industry, which he will use to not only increase Oyster’s marketing efforts but also aid in making Oyster appealing to large commercial ad networks looking for an alternative to traditional web advertising. Chris’ LinkedIn can be found here, and his personal blog can be read here.

State of the Infrastructure

All hooknode systems are ready to Go for their transition to Golang. Our deployment team is working today and this weekend to transition our existing Oyster Pearl IOTA nodes from PHP/Java to a Golang implementation. We expect this will lower our time required for Proof of Work and also give us a quicker development and deployment cycle.

The Oyster Storage system that represented our work on Testnet A will be using the new Golang hooknodes by next week or earlier. At the same time, half of our team has been hard at work improving the storage mechanisms we showed in previous videos. By enhancing our hooknode selection and modifying our IOTA transaction parameters, we will soon bring the storage system back for public release and at the same time improve the general health of the IOTA Tangle.

Testnet B

Our R&D team is on-track to deliver Testnet B at the end of February. The second part of our Testnet will enable web node to web node communication for the first time. This communication between web nodes is the first step to having the one line of javascript that website owners can use to earn PRL revenue and is also the initial implementation of the meshnet that will power the Oyster SHL.

Testnet B will primarily demonstrate how web nodes are launched and begin working as users visit our site. We aim to provide a graphical representation showing web users that land on OysterProtocol.com, using Testnet B’s javascript, performing the need-requests, Proof of Work, and node communication that will power the system.

As always, we encourage the community to post any comments or questions they have to our reddit or our Telegram knowledge channel.