STORE Community Update — January 2023
With "Store it", STORE releases product providing decentralized and perpetual storage for NFTs.
Welcome to the new year, STORE community! As the storm of 2022 slowly ebbs away, STORE looks forward to what can be in 2023. Though our strategy and roadmap do not alter based on the frequent sways of the market, January has provided a glimpse of a brighter future as the crypto winter slowly thaws, perhaps. Asset prices in the crypto industry rose along with the equities market as investors gradually came off the sidelines.
Regardless, STORE continues to build. In 2022, the R&D team accomplished many breakthroughs in the architecture of novel technology across the STORE ecosystem, including the consensus algorithm economics of cloud billing with tokens, governance, and much more. As 2023 begins, we can see the paradigm shift as STORE is now starting to ship the products that the team has been hard at work designing. Chris has included demos of products such as our block explorer and forever storage in recent investor meetings, and we’re happy to say that we’ll have a lot more to show in the next quarter.
To that point, we’ve entered QA on v1 of Forever Storage, which allows users to mint NFTs and have them stored permanently on the decentralized STORE Cloud while being secured on the blockchain by either STORE Chain (future use case) or through integrations with other networks such as Ethereum. Once testing is complete and it moves to production, Forever Storage will be STORE’s first live computing service. This immutable and perpetual storage offering will be the 4th arm of STORE Cloud along with memory, compute, and run-time storage.
The STORE Oracle is also pushing towards production. Last week, engineers completed the initial APIs, with hundreds of other web services to follow. These APIs will tie together all facets of STORE, including Explorer, Cloud, and Chain. Next, the team will integrate Oracle into the Store Explorer demo following the testing phase of these APIs.
Speaking of APIs, we have yet another product coming along smoothly. STORE’s developer platform will be best in class in Web3 and even rival traditional public clouds such as AWS, Hetzner, and Azure. This tool allows STORE to oversee a global decentralized network with a trust-minimized governance. Through digital signatures, developers can gain access to STORE APIs to build on top of the platform and earn tokens through the $STORE token ecosystem. These signatures ensure that developers are held liable to the STORE Constitution governing the network.
Looking forward to STORE Chain and its development, STORE R&D worked around the clock to crack the code on the best programming language for math-based, high-performance transactions and is pleased to share with the community that the team’s persistence has paid off, and the code has been cracked! Additionally, the Engineering team broke through a significant blocking bug last week and continues to focus on the Rust implementation through Q1.
In other notes in Engineering and R&D, STORE Cloud billing continues progressing as the team focuses on the wireframe designs and works toward a visually cohesive presentation that mirrors STORE Explorer. Developments on the STORE VM, smart contracts, and Deposited Supply are coming down the road.
Moving to governance, operations and legal continue to drive order through streamlined processes, managing compliance and diligence while supporting Chris on continued CAPEX endeavors. The team has focused heavily on Governance as STORE gears up to accelerate the voter registration process and engineer an updated voting method to drive participation in future governance proposal votes.
The last week of the month saw STORE make significant progress towards setting up what was once referred to as the STORE Foundation. Recent due diligence revealed that rather than erecting a Foundation in Liechtenstein as previously thought, creating an Association in Switzerland, a more crypto-friendly nation, would be beneficial. Associations and Foundations are similar legal concepts, but an Association would provide more advantages to the project’s goal. Legal counsel has reviewed Chris’ proposal for this concept, and as no major red flags were raised, it will now be sent to a legal team in Switzerland for review.
Lastly, we want to provide a quick update on fundraising. CAPEX remains a key focus as the team continues with the second phase of the funding raise. STORE has made steady progress with the token sale and has many new investor meetings lined up for February while engaging in advanced discussions with potential partners. Chris revised the protocol deck to focus on our most recent accomplishments, many outlined above, and we’re excited to show potential partners what we’ve been up to.
With the community’s continued help, this subsequent funding round will keep the project on track to launch the STORE Association, a crucial milestone in furthering the dissemination of the $STORE token to our investors and onto public exchanges.
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.