$PRL
1. The Core Concept
PRL was the internal utility token for Oyster Pearl, a project that launched in late 2017 with an incredibly ambitious goal: monetizing website traffic without advertisements.
The core mechanism was designed as an alternative to traditional ads (Google AdSense, etc.):
For Users: Instead of seeing intrusive banner ads, visitors to an Oyster-enabled website would consent (via a background script) to contributing a small amount of their web browser's processing power (CPU and GPU).
The System: This aggregated processing power was used to perform data attachment and maintenance for a distributed storage network built on the IOTA Tangle.
The Reward: Website owners (publishers) were paid in PRL tokens by users who wanted to store data on this network.
2. PRL Tokenomics & Utility
Within this ecosystem, the PRL token had two primary functions:
Payment for Storage: Users who wanted to store data anonymously on the distributed network had to purchase PRL and spend it to "rent" storage space. The price of storage was mathematically pegged to PRL (e.g., 1 PRL might purchase 1 GB of storage for 1 year).
Publisher Incentives: Website publishers earned PRL when users visiting their sites performed the necessary work (via the browser script) to maintain the data stored by others on the network