Oyster Pearl: A Small Cap Delicacy And Gem For 2018?

Oyster Pearl was an ICO that didn't go so great but the dev team been active detailing how they are going to accomplish their roadmap. There are a lot of risks involved in this coin but for the reason's below, I going to hodl a little bit and see how 2018 treats it.

Oyster Pearl is a ERC20 token that utilizes Ethereums smart contracts as well as IOTA's tangle. It will be used primarily as a decentralized storage ledger. Pearl is unique in that it tackles two problems, burdensome advertisements and reliable decentralized data storage.

We all hate advertisements on websites. I can't stand visiting the webpages of the Wall Street Journal and eBaumsworld (I have diverse taste) and being asked to disable my ad-blocker because they rely on ad revenue. It's annoying but its a necessary evil, or at least it was. Enter Oyster Pearl. Websites will be able to include a single line of code in their web page's code which will use spare CPU and GPU space of their visitors for POW. The POW is two-fold. The GPU will be used for IOTA POW while the CPU will be used for a unique "oyster-hunt POW" which from my understanding, ensure all the Pearls are not instantly made available to the node holders which secures the hosted data. Effectively, the web-page will no longer have to rely on annoying advertisements to generate revenue and the web-page visitor will have a seamless web-browsing experience.

The other bird is decentralized storage. Users can spend Pearls to have their data hosted on IOTA's tangle network. The data is hosted by IOTA node owners. Presently, there is a concern that the IOTA network can be attacked by filling us the disk-space of the nodes. This is particularly a concern for Oyster Pearl because it seeks to host actual data on tangle, which is not what its presently designed for. However, IOTA has an imminent "sharding" development that will resolve this issue. The primary developer for IOTA, CfM has stated that the sharding is basically at their fingertips for release, and suggested that is there were "data pruning" concerns it would just be released in a matter of days (unsure if this was meant to be taken literally because sharding is a major development).

There are some concerns with the project. Primarily that the lead developer, Bruno, is anonymous. There are also concerns arising from the ICO not meeting expectations and future funding of the project. The devs are sitting on a large dev fund and are asking the community for thoughts on how to use it to raise funds, market the coin and reduce the size of the devfund.

All in all, its a risky project but the dev is very active (we all hear that alot but just check out the telegram). He posts technical drawings on how it all works and answers the communities questions quickly and competently. For that reason, I'm putting in a small amount into Oyster Pearl.

USEFUL LINKS
Webpage: https://oyster.ws/ (Oyster - Web Storage)
CoinMarketCap: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/oyster-pearl/ (Oyster Pearl (PRL) price, charts, market cap, and other metrics | CoinMarketCap)
Telegram: https://t.me/oysterprotocol (Oyster Protocol)
BitcoinTalk Announcement: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2222507.0 ([ANN] OYSTER Anonymous Storage Generates Revenue for Websites)
White Paper: https://oyster.ws/OysterWhitepaper.pdf
Github: https://github.com/oysterprotocol (Oyster Web Storage · GitHub)
Trello (trasks development progress): https://trello.com/oysterprotocol (Trello)