From Official Discord channel:

Werner Heisenberg (Vice-president and Operations manager) on February 25th, 2019:

“The Phoenix storage cluster is now talking to the Shift blockchain, and they’ve quickly become friends. That is to say, Phoenix has successfully executed a verify_PIN function through consulting the Shift blockchain, resulting in a fully integrated PIN transaction being sent for the first time. This exciting news means that our major milestone of blockchain integration with the storage network has now officially been completed! With this achieved, and following the conclusion of an external code audit that begins this week, we will be ready to conduct our testnet launch!”

Ralf S (Shift President and Lead Developer) on February 1st, 2019:

“In response to the market downturn, we began minimizing team expenses a good deal of time ago. This is perhaps something that has been evident in our decision to focus on development rather than marketing. In light of that decision, we have been able to sustain progress on the Shift Project, and have the funds necessary to continue in this manner long term, if necessary.”

From Official Ryver chat:

Ralf S (Shift President and Lead Developer) on December 20th, 2018:

“Still making progress on the backend every day. But I admit it’s an awful lot of work. We’ve received various request in DM to show something to the public. But it’s mainly code work we’re doing now, no eye candy. But I guess I can share a bit of what we’re working on right now. I will paste some screens in our Discord channel.”