State of $STORE - Fall 2022
State of STORE is a global public update for published for token owners, team members, ecosystem partners, and more.
The small but mighty STORE community on Telegram got a first-hand look at the STORE demo this past Friday. The early reviews have been extremely promising.
Read our previous update here.
Author: Chris McCoy, CEO of STORE Labs, Inc.
Reviewed by: Josh Lawler, Securities Lawyer and multiple STORE advisors
DISCLAIMER: The information provided in this presentation pertaining to STORE Labs, Inc. (“STORE”) and $STORE tokens is for general informational purposes only and is not a formal offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any securities. While information in this presentation is believed to be accurate and reliable, STORE and its agents, advisors, directors, officers, employees and shareholders make no representation or warranties, expressed or implied, as to the accuracy of such information and STORE expressly disclaims any and all liability that may be based on such information or errors or omissions thereof. STORE reserves the right to amend or replace the information contained in the presentation, in part or entirely, at any time, and undertakes no obligation to notify you thereof.
Below is our Fall 2022 $STORE Partner update. Our progress is stronger than it’s ever been. We’re not only doing what we set out to do, we’re pioneering a new direction for Web3 with novel inventions at the blockchain consensus, blockchain economics, cloud infrastructure, NFT infrastructure, and governance layers. We’re committed to winning, and with your help, we can.
CONTENTS
0. INTRO
I. WHY WE’RE EXCITED
II. OTHER PROGRESS
III. INSTITUTIONAL SUPPORT IS GROWING
IV. STRATEGIC RE-PRICING OF $STORE
V. UPCOMING $4 MILLION TOKEN SALE
VI. CONCLUSION
0. INTRO
STORE is a fast, asynchronous, and leaderless zero-fee public blockchain integrated into a high-performance Web3 cloud. The protocol is governed by a checks and balances democracy and secured by Dynamic Proof-of-Stake (DyPoS).
Our Belief: The tradable, NFT-powered internet will be bigger than today’s ad-powered internet
Our Mission: Everything in bits — images, video, audio, data, code, computing resources, and more — will be represented as NFTs and made tradable on public blockchains. STORE will be the zero-fee ledger to trace any asset in the world, the Web3 cloud to store NFTs forever, and the democracy to support any future use case.
We are building to compete with Amazon Web Services in cloud computing and with Ethereum, Solana, and Cosmos in blockspace computing, while pioneering cloudspace — an emerging type of decentralized computing resource that could generate more protocol revenue than blockspace.
We see a Web3 where it takes just one click and one token to issue NFTs and the same click to store them forever while legitimately governing them with a decentralized democracy. With STORE, there is no longer a need to store the underlying file on a centralized file service like Dropbox or a decentralized storage-only service like Arweave which requires its own separate token — forever storage and NFT token issuance can both be done with a single click and a single token ($STORE). STORE is pioneering one-click and one token immutable NFTs.
We see the tradable and decentralized internet of data represented by private keys — NFTs — being more valuable and equitable to society than the centralized and ad-powered internet of today where just a handful of tech superpowers capture most of the value leaving the rest of us with “likes”. STORE is being carefully and responsibly developed to serve as both a high-speed zero-fee settlement network (a public blockchain, or blockspace) and high-performance cloud infrastructure (cloudspace) for this computing shift — a tectonic, trillion-dollar computing shift still in its infancy. The pundits call it Web3. We call it, and are building for, the tradable internet — a public internet where every piece of meaningful public data and content is represented by a private key that is a tradable NFT.
We are on a mission, and as you can see in our 30-minute protocol demo, we are making technical and operational progress towards it daily: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bm7WPEB1BMo
While we build on the engineering and product front, our team is framing the STORE protocol to be institutional-grade, tax-compliant, regulatory-compliant, and perpetually funded, resulting in an enduring decentralized computing infrastructure. Today, we’re operating in the U.S. Tomorrow, we anticipate it’s Europe and then beyond. If we’re correct, STORE Governance should have a credible opportunity to operate and govern the STORE protocol for as long as there is demand from app developers and NFT creators for STORE’s computing resources — both on-chain and off. We anticipate that our long-term patient approach will be the key to STORE winning in the 2020s and beyond.
We can win and we will need your help to do it. We’ll send a follow-up email later this week with actionable steps on how you can help us push STORE forward, including helping kick-start our upcoming $4 Million invite-only token sale, the private sale that we expect will push our STORE Foundation across the finish line in 2023.
Alongside this Fall 2022 $STORE Partner update, please review our latest deck for a full picture of our vision, technical progress, foundation progress, and information on our upcoming private token sale: https://docsend.com/view/367yymzn55tgzais. We recommend reviewing after you’ve watched our demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bm7WPEB1BMo
Finally, STORE is a decentralized protocol built and supported by many around the globe. We want to give a special thanks to our long-term angel investors who have gone the extra distance to help us push through the tectonic market shift over the past four months: Bitcoin Jack, Ahmed Alkhatib, Kevin Beaman, Teepee Capital, and Bill MacDonald. Without all of you, we wouldn’t be building. Without this small group, we wouldn’t be as far along on key technical, governance, and operational fronts. All support is greatly appreciated by our global team. We cannot climb this mountain without it.
I. WHY WE’RE EXCITED
STORE CHAIN
With your support and our persistence, we have made tremendous progress on what we originally set out to do: bring a high-speed, zero-fee public blockchain to the world.
We are now producing blocks and confirming transactions on an alpha version of STORE Chain, our original invention. Check out the demo of transactions and blocks starting at https://youtu.be/Bm7WPEB1BMo?t=66
We’re making daily progress on STORE Chain while taking a responsible approach to its long-term R&D. While we still have plenty of work to do, we have crossed the Rubicon, moving our R&D from theory (2017–2018) to receiving a United States patent on our underlying leaderless and async BFT consensus mechanism (2021), to moving an early implementation of the algorithm into the high-speed STORE Chain (2022). After surviving a 2+ year bear market that was fatal for many projects, I’m very proud to say that STORE Chain is not only coming alive, but it’s supported by both a brewing decentralized democracy and high-performance cloud infrastructure that can allow it to scale both off-chain compute and governance –all incentivized by the $STORE token.
FIRST USE CASE: ONE-CLICK NFTs
Alongside STORE Chain, powered by STORE Cloud, we are inventing a new class of NFT infrastructure. As the STORE protocol comes to market, we’re engineering our first use case to enable one token and one-click NFT storage, minting, and payment — all with $STORE. This simplifies the multi-click and multi-token NFT minting experience of today where issuers either centralize the storage of the underlying asset on a public cloud like AWS paying fiat currency, or immutably store the file on Arweave or Filecoin which requires its own separate token. Once stored, it requires another token to mint the NFT onto a public blockchain like Ethereum or Solana. With STORE, we’re simplifying forever storage and issuance of NFTs down to a single token and single click. At launch, we expect to support the Ethereum blockchain and potentially expand to Solana. This use case will provide STORE with enough go-to-market utility to begin building a network effect around cloudspace.
As STORE Chain comes online, this one-click infrastructure paves the way for high-performance apps to build on STORE Cloud and then quickly mint any data or user-generated content as NFTs. This high-velocity NFT infrastructure is the beginning of how STORE powers the NFT-powered tradable internet.
II. OTHER PROGRESS
STORE CLOUD
STORE Cloud is currently running inside six data centers and powers all testing, oracles, and NFT storage for the STORE protocol. We’ve been building Cloud since 2020 after recognizing that, for STORE Chain to scale and for high-performance apps to run on STORE Chain, it would need off-chain computing resources — it would need a high-performance and trust-minimized cloud. Our approach to vertically integrating high-performance cloud infrastructure alongside a high-speed chain provides STORE with a long-term strategic advantage.
Our next engineering build is to integrate STORE Governance inside of Cloud, the first democratically governed high-performance cloud on the planet. Upgrading p2p infrastructure quickly is an unsolved problem amongst layer ones and STORE is correctly positioned to solve it through governance.
STORE GOVERNANCE
We’ve invented and fully designed best-in-class tooling that allows the future STORE Foundation to launch, govern, and incentivize the protocol in a manner that makes global tax compliance efficient for both the STORE Foundation and the miners securing the STORE protocol.
STORE FOUNDATION AND $STORE LISTING
These past 18 months, we’ve done a tremendous amount of work to establish the STORE Foundation in Liechtenstein. For STORE to complete the final set of heavy-duty milestones, we’re reserving $500,000 of our upcoming $4,000,000 token sale for the Foundation project and another $500,000 for future exchange listings (which may or may not be available to US Persons, depending on applicable law at such time). We expect this funding to get us across the finish line and into a first token release.
Below you can see an updated timeline for the Foundation and the listing of the STORE asset (Q3-Q4 2023). Our timeline is contingent upon successfully capitalizing the next phase of our R&D (more below).
DYNAMIC PROOF-OF-STAKE
Dynamic Proof-of-Stake (DyPoS) is the economic and security mechanism for STORE. Fundamentally, it’s an algorithm developed by STORE Research to stabilize network security for on-chain computing resources, off-chain computing resources, and governance. One can think of it as Uber Surge Pricing for p2p computing security. We’re fully through algorithm research and design, are now in the process of writing about it publicly in the upcoming STORE Economics Paper, and are on the cusp of beginning to implement DyPoS into STORE Chain consensus logic.
PRESS AND PUBLIC DIALOGUE ARE GROWING
Historically, we’ve built under the radar with limited press or marketing. Nearly all of our exposure has been organic. Recently, the crypto press has taken more attention to our seed-level project. Not only that, but Google Cloud leaders spent two days discussing and debating me on the merits of centralized infrastructure‘s role in Web3. Take a look at the full thread (many tweets). It’s rare that a tech superpower publicly engages like this.
WHAT’S NEXT
-Our team invents and builds in 24/7 R&D cycles. Below is our technical, economic, and governance R&D either in active development or planned.
-Writing accounts and p2p storage logic for STORE Chain
-Integrating DyPoS into the STORE Chain consensus layer
-Expanding our alpha network from 17 nodes to 100+
-Releasing the STORE Economics paper for peer review
-Releasing the STORE Constitution for peer review
-Publishing an IEEE Paper on BFT ID, the security model for governance
-Building out STORE APIs — the STORE Oracle — so third party developers can build with the same data and economic logic as the STORE protocol
-Completing advancing billing in STORE Cloud for RAM and Compute
-Developing on-chain STORE Governance tooling
-Developing on-chain STORE Cloud ratification tooling
-Jepsen security audits on STORE Chain and BlockfinBFT
III. INSTITUTIONAL SUPPORT IS GROWING
Over the last 18 months, we’ve garnered support of leading institutional infrastructure companies for digital assets — and the support is growing. Our success on this critical front speaks to the strengths of not only the STORE project but to our institutional-grade approach to regulatory compliance and tax compliance. We’re now supported by Bitgo for institutional custody — the $STORE asset will be managed from their secure wallet environment. We also have support from the digital bank Anchorage on custody with the opportunity to expand our Treasury Management functions through them. Circle is now supporting the project for the USDC stablecoin. We’re in active conversations with a Big 4 accounting firm about managing our entire Treasury function. Finally, we’re in active discussion with a leading Washington D.C. think tank at the intersection of technology and policy about peer reviewing, auditing, and potentially helping facilitate STORE Second Governance.
IV. STRATEGIC RE-PRICING $STORE
Given the increased crypto market volatility since May and to encourage participation in the upcoming private token sale, STORE Labs, Inc. conducted a vote with STORE First Governance — a governance of one $10,000 $STORE wallet, one vote — to re-price the $STORE token to $0.039.
Results
With 75% approval, First Governance voted to re-price $STORE to $0.039, giving the project a private market capitalization of ~$25 Million. First Governance also voted to rebalance all owners with an entry price above $0.039 down to $0.039. This governance decision ensures that no wallets in the project are underwater. These wallets have now received token grants from the STORE Ecosystem Fund. Learn more about the vote here.
V. UPCOMING $4 MILLION TOKEN SALE
Later this week, we’ll email our long-term $STORE partners with an opportunity to purchase $STORE at $0.039. This insider opportunity will kick-start a larger $4 Million private token sale that we’ll conduct strategically over the next 3–6 months (a global Reg D and Reg S offering).
To-date, STORE Labs, Inc. has sold rights to around $8 Million of tokens across a rolling, invite-only angel round. Most of these sales have arisen from inbound expressions of interest. Comparatively, other leading layer ones like Solana and Cosmos sold $17–$20 Million in tokens before hitting mainnet. We’re tracking very well, and anticipate getting the protocol launched with ~$12 Million.
To see how we plan to allocate the $4 Million being sought, please see our Use of Funds presentation: https://docsend.com/view/376ec5mpwfaq4d78
VI. CONCLUSION
In 1787, United States Founding Father Benjamin Franklin was walking out of Independence Hall after the Constitutional Convention when someone shouted out, “Doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy?” To which Franklin responded: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
STORE is an ambitious experiment in bringing a digital, p2p republic to computing resources. Our experiment ultimately is one of incentivizing a global computing system that secures both zero-fee blockspace and a high-performance Web3 cloud with the $STORE token. In other words, STORE is an experiment in transforming computing resources into crypto tokens, and then governing those computing resources with a checks and balances democracy. If we’re right, STORE is bringing democracy to computers.
We have made significant progress in turning our vision into reality and our team is committed to seeing this vision brought to market. Our ambition is real, a decentralized democracy is brewing with STORE First Governance, we know that we can win, but we must earn it.
To complete the important developments needed prior to launching the STORE protocol and the $STORE token, the project will require additional resources. We now seek your assistance in contributing to the success of our upcoming private fund raise. More information coming to your inbox later this week.
On behalf of everyone building STORE, we greatly appreciate your long-term support. We would not be building the future without it.
Yours in innovation,
Chris McCoy, CEO @ STORE Labs, Inc.
“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan Press On! has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”
― Calvin Coolidge, 30th U.S. President