STORE Community Update - April 2023

Welcome to Springtime, as Q1 is behind us. We are beginning to see the end of a crypto winter as the thawing has already started, and asset prices across the crypto industry have risen significantly from their recent bottoms. Bitcoin and Ethereum are near notable thresholds, perhaps a sign of things to come for the rest of 2023. For STORE, Q1 was a solid start to the year as we hit our goals of launching the initial versions of multiple key components of the protocol, such as Store Oracle, Forever Storage, and more. Shipping these products results from months of hard work researching, designing, and building out our product suite. Let’s dig in!

In Engineering, STORE’s principal focus is building the framework for how the protocol’s storage and compute resources will be priced and expressed. These real-time prices for resources are calculated, converted, and delivered by the Store Oracle. The end of the month saw the release of the first version of the real-time pricing Oracle APIs. These APIs ensure the pricing of assets and resources across the protocol are dynamic and adjust accordingly based on various network factors providing a live market of decentralized storage and computing resources on the STORE Protocol. 

The team recently redesigned the API method endpoints to simplify the pricing process and remove the conversion data ($USD to $STORE, $STORE to bits, etc.), providing a better experience for the end user. In parallel with the API infrastructure development mentioned above, Engineering is also developing the associated front-end UIs that give this data to future developers on STORE. This is the last major hurdle before Store Cloud goes to market with an end-to-end solution for decentralized cloud services.

If the Store Oracle is priority 1A, Forever Storage is 1B. Since the initial release of Forever Storage in January, the team has been busy iterating on the product and shipping updates and enhancements. Previously, the group performed a clean-up of the UI, including adding more metadata fields to the NFT asset structure and rerouting the APIs that integrate with the product. 

Secondly, we’ve developed to further STORE’s publicity. When minting NFTs, creators can add the STORE logo (along with the term “Powered by STORE”) to their NFT design. If the creator opts to do so, they receive a small discount in the fees paid for cloudspace and perpetual storage for their asset. The enhancement is a branding opportunity for STORE as that asset links back to the STORE project continuously through a simple programmatic solution where we can track the number of page views and the number of clicks on the NFTs. 

To bolster the work done on Oracle and Forever Storage, Engineering has made significant progress on the tooling users will utilize to work with these products. The front-ends for Developer, Governor, and Oracle are currently in a testing sprint where the team has been able to receive feedback quickly and iterate on the product. These tools provide a world-class experience for external developers to plug into the STORE protocol and access network data via the API suite in a secure and easy-to-use manner. Look for this set of tooling to be released in conjunction with Oracle and Store Cloud deployments to complete the user experience.

Moving to longer-term projects, the implementation of Store Chain moves forward, led by Rag. The team is writing Chain and its Dynamic Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism in Rust. The coding language imparts a learning curve but does provide advantages down the road. The Engineering team has joined the long list of development teams utilizing AI tools to enhance productivity as they are using GPT-4 to detect inefficiencies in the code, discover security vulnerabilities, and expand test coverage. A 4-week sprint on Store Chain kicked off in late April, so the team will have a further update on progress towards the end of May.

Looking outwards, Chris and Rag have begun a future-looking research project investigating how AI models, neural nets, etc., could have their own monetary policies utilizing tokenized data to represent the algorithms and proprietary data. STORE believes that the paths of AI and Web3 technology will soon be connecting, precisely the space where STORE is currently inventing and building. We’re starting to see traction on this idea as others in the industry come along to STORE’s line of thinking.

In Operations, STORE has big news to share as we wrapped up the month by finalizing an agreement with a new partner. Pulley, an end-to-end asset management firm, will be coming on board to help manage the $STORE Treasury. Their technology and expertise will provide the flexibility and accounting standards needed to govern the $STORE token table and distribution, including potential multiple wallet options that provide enterprise-grade security. This partnership will drive our token releases and multi-signature approval process for Treasury operations. It’s a crucial step towards initiating the STORE Association and our token launch. Ensuring that the Association demonstrates proper compliance with legal and tax standards in handling STORE’s decentralized monetary policy is vital for the launch of the $STORE token.

The month of April also saw the design of our decentralized governance model come together with help from our Legal partners here and abroad as the work to erect the STORE Association in Switzerland was fruitful. The teams have collaborated on how to best construct the Association in legal terms, including how intellectual property developed by Store Research, Inc. will be licensed and employed by the Association on behalf of the protocol. Some due diligence remains, but all signs point toward a successful launch of the Association in Switzerland. STORE’s design of a decentralized democracy will likely be the first to use stake-based governance that does not succumb to the plutocracy that has unfortunately plagued other decentralized governance frameworks. The most recent governance design introduces the Security Branch. This separate governance entity is responsible for the network’s security, including managing control of the keys for upgrading critical network components, such as the Oracle. STORE believes that this will aid in decentralizing governance as one single entity cannot force through changes to the network.

Please stay tuned for the latest State of STORE address that will provide intimate details on the work outlined here and what’s to come for the project. We aim to publish this information in May and look forward to sharing more of what the team has been working on.

As always, we thank the community for your continued support.

We encourage you to learn more by reading the STORE deck:‍

https://docsend.com/view/uv6qfx45kg2uy6nf‍

If you have questions, please send them to team@storecloud.org