Opacity — November Recap
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Happy December! As previously mentioned, this post will mark the first of Opacity’s monthly updates. These updates will provide ample details around the progress being made by the business, the current state of our finances and other key business details as we continue to build out the platform.
General Business Update
November was a busy month for Opacity. Here’s a quick recap for what all happened:
- Launch of Opacity
- Completed creation of new smart contract for Opacity (OPQ) on 11/9
- Completed subsequent airdrop of OPQ tokens on 11/12
- Hired new outside legal counsel
- Began to put together company formation and Howey Memo documentation
- Retained and began to structure employment agreements for current team members
- Converted all third-party software licenses and other legacy Oyster Protocol Inc. business expenses over to Opacity
- Restarted development work
It has been a busy month and we only expect things to pick up even further in December. Please see the sections below for further plans and details on what is upcoming this month.
Development Update
In the month of December and January, the development team will work on monetizing the platform. The primary reason for this is to ensure there is further comfort around the utility case for Opacity moving forward. As a result, feature work which doesn’t directly contribute to monetization has been put on hold momentarily (rev2, S3, etc.). On the front-end side of things, the team will work on re-skinning the storage website with our new look as we transition fully to Opacity. We’ll launch the storage website on a new Opacity URL and add a re-direct on the old oysterstorage website to direct users to the new website. The team will consider adding a terms and conditions and/or privacy policy that users must consent to before they can do an upload. Many websites have terms that users must check a box to show that they have agreed to, before they can use the website’s service. Our terms would be something similar to that and no data would be collected about the storage user.
On the back-end, we’ll also be changing former Oyster references in the code to Opacity, and writing migration files to change database column names. The brokernode currently has several “modes” it can run in-we will add an additional simplified production mode, which does not bury treasures or sell genesis hashes, but which will still expect payment from the user before an upload will begin. We will also spend several weeks QA’ing these changes to make sure we haven’t introduced any problems.
Budget / Forecast Update
In our initial update on November 5th, we shared a short, pro-forma budget for the remainder of the 2018 (top-section of table). In this update, we have included actual cost results for November as well as an updated forecast for December (middle-section of table) and the variances between the two (bottom-section of table).
November ultimately came in short from a cost perspective as our resources that bill on a daily basis worked on a lighter basis during November. Additionally, our expense base was slightly lower than anticipated for the month as we began to transition over to new third-party software licenses and worked through other general business expenses. Ultimately, our actuals came in approximately $9,000 (16.4%) lower than what we had initially budgeted for.
For the December Forecast, we anticipate our cost base increasing to approximately $20,000 and our headcount-related costs holding flat at $47,000. The increase in Non-HC expenses is primarily attributable to business formation and other legal expenses as we get incorporated and structured and go back through the Howey Memo process with our new general counsel.
In next month’s update, we will provide a budget for the first quarter of 2019.
Token Supply Update
In the interest of providing transparency to the community around our finances and the token supply in general, we have also broken out our key, company-owned wallets by amount and address.
Each wallet address and wallet balance can be found in the table above. We reserve the right to change these wallets over time (on an as needed basis) but will continue to update the community if any of these changes occur.
Website Update
The re-brand design for the Opacity website has been completed, and we are currently in the process of building the site now. Whereas the Oyster website ended up being an amalgamation of design choices from a previous design firm and our product designer, Taylor, the Opacity site will feature a more coherent design language that will be reflected in both the main website and the storage interface. Many of the color choices have been cleaned up, but the overall site design will retain a level of familiarity to the previous design. We are very excited to showcase the new website to the community once development on the site has been completed.
SHL Update
While Opacity ultimately has no responsibility or connection to Oyster Protocol Inc., we realize that many current holders of OPQ probably held SHL at some point in time. Our stance regarding SHL has not changed at this point in time. Our goal is to get OPQ in good standing from a utility-case standpoint as quickly as possible. Given that development on SHL is still far off in the development roadmap, we are electing to postpone any decision here until we are more comfortable from a legality standpoint. We will share further updates here as things continue to develop.
Summary
We thank our community for sticking by us and supporting Opacity through a tumultuous time-frame. Our team is continuing to work hard, on either no or very minimal salaries, to help the project continue moving forward. We are excited for what is to come in the next month and in 2019.
