Oyster Pearl (PRL): An Interesting Project, Or A Short-Term Play?

There have been two acute trends at play in the cryptoverse over the past few days: the unprecedented explosion in the price of ether (ETH), and the diversification of these newly-created profits into small market-cap altcoins.

A rising winner from this latter dynamic? The Ethereum-based ERC20 token Oyster Pearl (PRL), which bears a market cap of approximately $100 million USD at press time.

Never heard of it? You're not alone. After launching in late 2017, the project flew under the radar for weeks. Now, with a few interesting employee hires and a re-branding forthcoming, buzz is generating.

Earlycomers combined with that buzz saw the PRL price burst from a few cents in price to upwards of $4 just hours ago.

Accordingly, some are projecting Oyster Pearl as the next "RaiBlocks" -- a reference to XRB's titanic price surge in recent days, and not a comparison between the two project's fundamentally disparate technologies.

So what's the scoop? Is PRL worthy of the hype, or just a product of the ongoing bubbling crypto markets?

We'll give you some things to think about.

What Oyster Pearl does

Oyster Pearl aims to provide two interesting solutions simultaneously: decentralized data storage and mitigating the need for web ads.

People hate online ads, and many want secure decentralized storage options, so that's where PRL aims to come in.

PRL's elevator pitch - Image via Oyster.ws 

It's a novel proposal, to say the least. The idea is that the Oyster project will create an entirely new kind of revenue stream for websites through a single script of code. Something like:

<script id="o.ws" payout="ETH_ADDRESS" src="https://oyster.ws/webnode.js"></script>

At this point, per the PRL website:

“Website visitors contribute a portion of their CPU and GPU power to enable users' files to be stored on a decentralized and anonymous ledger. In return, such users indirectly pay the website owners for maintaining the storage of their data.”

Even more interesting? The data that's uploaded through the Oyster script will allegedly be maintained on IOTA's Tangle, using the Tangle's data redundancy capabilities to mitigate data loss.

New hires, re-branding

In a new Medium post, Oyster team consultant William Cordes announced that the entire project would be done re-branding by January 12th, 2018.

That re-branding could already be price in to PRL's price ($3.28 at press time), but we'll have to wait and see.

Cordes also noted that newly raised funds allowed the Oyster team to hire 13 new team members, some having experience at Amazon, Uber, Google, IBM, and HP.

So what's the move

It's crucial for you to do your own research and only do what your comfortable with. Small-cap coins are extremely susceptible to price manipulation or tanking altogether.

Oyster Pearl could end up being the next Confido, or the next Raiblocks, or something absolutely in between with regard to price movement in the coming days.

From our vantage point? PRL has an attractive circulating supply, and the project is still early on.

Those two factors alone will be enough to attract new investors in the short-term. The Force is clouded with this one as far as the mid- and long-term goes, but it's looking very likely that PRL could go up much further before it corrects considerably.

Lastly, users have been trouble finding the PRL subreddit. You can check it out at r/Oyster.