Even with the exponential growth that the internet has seen over the past couple of decades, the mechanisms for web monetization that exist today remain quite archaic and susceptible to manipulation. Also, the sentiment of the average person towards web advertisements is quite poor, and in the past year or so, the use of ad blockers has become quite commonplace.

The Oyster Protocol, or Oyster Pearl, is an all-new platform that employs a unique approach to getting content publishers and consumers to work with one another, thereby enabling both parties to benefit monetarily. To be more specific, Oyster Pearl enables everyday internet users to store and retrieve their files via a system that is decentralized, anonymous and secure.

Oyster Pearl has been devised specifically to remedy the stalemate that exists between advertisers and ad-blockers. This is achieved by empowering a website to generate revenue by adopting a single line of code that is specific to the platform.

In addition to this, the service makes use of a decentralized online storage system that has been conceived through the use of the Ethereum blockchain along with IOTA’s Tangle protocol. The result is Oyster Pearl, a unique product that allows users to employ its native currency to generate value for themselves as well as content distributors.

Overview

• Oyster Pearl provides internet users with a decentralized and private method of data storage.
• Network participants are reimbursed in the form of native Pearl tokens.
• Independent users can join the platform quite easily and can also monetize their content directly by uploading their data straight onto the decentralized ledger.
• Website owners and content publishers receive incentives for providing ad-free content and contributing to the data storage network.
• The interface is quite simple and straightforward.

Key Features

To kick things off, we can see that Oyster Pearl provides users with solutions to two key problems that currently plague the internet as a whole. 

1. It provides users with a stable decentralized data storage medium.
2. It helps eliminate the need for web ads.

Key features on offer

Since a large number of online advertisements carry with them malware and other unwanted entities, Oyster Pearl helps mitigate issues related to virus infections and other performance problems which might otherwise affect computer devices.

Similarly, from the perspective of online revenue generation, the Oyster Protocol establishes a financial stream through the use of a unique code-script algorithm. The platform allows users to contribute a small portion of their CPU and GPU power to enable data storage on a decentralized and anonymous ledger. This allows for mutual monetary compensation for all of the involved parties.

One of the standout features of this system is that all of the information that is uploaded through the aforementioned Oyster script is processed via IOTA’s Tangle mechanism. This not only helps eliminate redundancy issues, but also reduces the problem of data mitigation.

How Oyster Pearl Works

As is clear by now, Oyster Pearl makes use of IOTA’s Tangle protocol to maintain its internal transactions in a smooth and streamlined fashion. Tangle is essentially a Directed Acyclic Graph, which means that it serves as a blockless distributed ledger system.

Primary revenue code-script employed by Oyster Pearl

Every transaction processed on this platform has to undergo a PoW (Proof of Work) mechanism before it can be confirmed and added to the blockchain. Each transaction comes with an intrinsic payload capacity which is used to obtain vital storage information from within the system.

It is also important to understand that each transaction has to go via a defined mesh-net of nodes that are based within a peer-to-peer network. Each node has the capacity to retain a redundant copy of the transactions, thus allowing for reduced data copies within the system mainframe.

Meshed framework deployed by the platform

Lastly, the Tangle protocol also helps heavily mitigate the risk of data loss without relying on a centralized hosting provider. This is because Tangle-based nodes are designed to automatically get rid of old data once they reach their physical storage limits.

About the Project

Oyster Protocol has demonstrated tremendous potential in the past couple of months, and thus it can be useful for readers to learn more about the people associated with this project.

Bill Cordes is the CFO of this venture. Bill has been in the finance and digital sector for over a decade now, and has previously worked at:

• Infogix Inc. — Director of Corporate Development and M&A
• NextGen — Venture Partner and Collaborator
• Cordes Consulting— Founder

Alex Firmani is the CTO of this project. He too has been in the digital domain for nearly two decades and has worked at high-profile companies such as Amazon.

Lastly, Taylor French is the Head of Communications and Design for Oyster Pearl. On his LinkedIn profile, Taylor describes himself as a “seasoned UX/UI design professional with extensive experience in design and communications”.

Token Performance Data

All internal transactions that take place on the platform are facilitated through the use of a native currency which is abbreviated as PRL.

 PRL token lifetime performance chart (courtesy of CoinMarketCap)

Released into the market late last year, PRL tokens were initially valued at US$0.032. However, the currency made a huge push earlier this year and scaled up to an impressive US$4.30 per coin.

The recent performance of PRL has not been as amazing, but considering the bear run that the markets seem to have been going through for the past few months, the token has remained quite stable in value (US$1.00 per coin as of March 31, 2018).

Final Thoughts

With the online advertising market slowly diminishing in size due to the use of ad blockers, Oyster Protocol is offering content providers and distributors with a novel system that has the potential to reinvigorate this market sector.

Judging by the steady performance of the PRL token since its inception, it would not be surprising to see more and more people adopt this platform in the coming months.

If you would like to invest in Oyster Pearl, PRL trading pairs are currently being exchanged on platforms such as KuCoin, Cryptopia, IDEX, and CoinExchange.