Oyster Mainnet Update

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The Oyster team has an important announcement regarding the release of Oysters Mainnet. The Oyster Mainnet release will be delayed until May 29th, 2018. In making this statement, we want to ensure our community that we did not make this decision lightly. The Oyster team has worked extremely hard to garner a strong reputation as a team that meets every deadline put forth. Additionally, Oyster is known for remaining transparent in its actions, and in keeping with this behavior, we will be explaining exactly why this delay is needed.

The IOTA Tangle is Not Ready for the Oyster Protocol

The IOTA team has done a great job at building out their infrastructure to prepare for the Tangles ultimate purpose as the backbone of the Internet of Things. However, the IOTA team has not yet implemented Swarm Intelligence and sharding into their system. For the Oyster protocol to operate as efficiently as possible for large-scale, redundant file storage, sharding will need to be implemented into IOTAs infrastructure.

Since IOTA has not yet implemented this feature, the Oyster development team decided to move to Oysters private Tangle. By using a private Tangle, Oyster can implement sharding into our infrastructure, allowing the protocol to be production-ready without relying on the implementation of sharding into IOTAs main Tangle. The ultimate goal for the Oyster protocol will be to merge back into the main Tangle when sharding is ready, but for the time being, using our private Tangle allows Oyster to be a commercially available product.

The Oyster development team has already made significant progress in running its own Tangle, as well as building off of IOTAs open source infrastructure to provide a sharding solution that will support Oysters need for large-scale, redundant storage. However, the decision to switch to a private Tangle meant that a lot of the backend already provided by Oysters two testnets needed to be rearchitected. Thus, delaying the Mainnet release to May 29th will allow the Oyster development team to finish Oysters private Tangle, as well as provide enough time for the protocol to go through rigorous stages of Quality Assurance (QA).

The Initial Roadmap was Decided Before the Development Team was Hired
When the Oyster roadmap was conceived, only two people were working on the protocol: Bruno, who single-handedly did the majority of the early coding and architecture of the project and myself who handled the design/graphics side of the project. Since then, the Oyster development team has grown exponentially, leading to more input on how the Oyster protocol should be architected to be as efficient as possible. For example, several architecture changes were made since the formation of the original roadmap including switching the backend from PHP to Golang. These changes were not considered when the original roadmap was formulated, subsequently making the original Mainnet release of April 2018 very tight.

Summary

The delay in the release of Oysters Mainnet is unfortunate, and we are not making light of our decision to push its release to May 29th. We also understand that announcing the delay a week before the release was to occur is unfortunate timing. However, the Oyster team was very confident that we would make the April deadline but unexpected delays and a requirement for very careful QA when currency is being exchanged convinced us that the product will not be suitable for production by the end of the month. The Oyster Mainnet will involve the use of real funds, and so the Oyster development team wants to ensure that the product will be working optimally before any funds are spent using our product.
Furthermore, we want to stress that Oyster is building a unique product that not only provides a reliable platform for anonymous, decentralized storage but also plans to revolutionize the way websites monetize their content. These goals are ambitious, and there is no other company or team providing solutions to these problems. Because this is entirely new territory, unforeseen hurdles will present themselves (e.g., architecting Oysters private Tangle) which can delay the products release. The Oyster development team has adapted very quickly to these hurdles and is working overtime to ensure that Oysters Mainnet will be ready for May 29th.

The Oyster team expresses our most profound gratitude for the patience and understanding of our community, and we will be releasing weekly infrastructure updates up until the new Mainnet release date. As always, we strongly encourage that people post their questions or comments to our Reddit or Telegram channel.