STORE Community Update - July 2023

How quickly time seems to move when you’re busy, and the STORE team has been nothing but busy this year. We’re already halfway through summer as we steam ahead to the next set of milestones. When looking back at the progress from the beginning of 2023, it’s great to see all the new products (Forever Storage) and tooling that has been built and deployed (Explorer, Powered By, Royalties). The latest demo, coming out soon and featuring some of these items, will be a great reminder of what has been accomplished with the help from our great community. Let’s take a look now specifically at what the team has worked on in July.

Engineering

One of the biggest focuses of our engineering team the past few months has been building out the pricing and billing models of the Store Cloud VM. It’s an essential model to get right as it will serve as the backbone for not just our current permanent storage solution but for all future cloud resources built on STORE, such as run-time compute and more. For every type of computing resource offered, the Store Oracle and its associated APIs will provide data such as sell price, replication factor, developer endowment, governance endowments, and more. A recent accomplishment on this project was the creation of two important measurements that help all network actors understand the balance of costs and earnings on the protocol: “Production Cost” and “Cost to Mint $STORE”. 

Essentially, the metrics represent the break-even cost of STORE and enable the protocol to manage network incentives to generate margins for decentralized resource providers. This balancing act resembles how Bitcoin miners must weigh their infrastructure costs against the profits earned from securing the network. The next step for Engineering of the Cloud VM is building the infrastructure and associated pricing for how an asset is accessed after it has been saved in STORE permanent storage. The team is now developing a working model for these infrastructure costs of bandwidth and networking. Once completed, this logic will be codified into the Oracle API.

Moving to the previously mentioned permanent storage service, Engineering recently shipped a variety of enhancements to the product. These included the addition of new metadata, tightening up the IPFS integration, enhancing the replication process, and adding more data to what’s shared cross-chain with Ethereum. Next up are further improvements on billing, including the upcoming credits logic and associated APIs. The use of Store Credits enables off-chain computing to happen on the protocol where a user can purchase credits to be used to access permanent storage resources on STORE without hitting Ethereum. Our ultimate goal is to provide as much real-time cost information as possible to our users, for any and all types of computing resources offered. STORE stands to be the first network, perhaps decentralized or even of the traditional sort, to atomize computing resources down to such granular levels.

Looking to the future, Store Research has begun a project diving into the world of video streaming, its costs, and its financial incentives. The team has been busy studying the individual costs of storage, streaming, bandwidth, etc. breaking each component down to granular, per-byte units. This research can open up a new model for issuing NFT-backed videos on the protocol and all the many new use cases that can stem from this. This pricing breakdown enables us to calculate the cost per stream, giving users the option to purchase stream units or opt for pay-per-view. Currently, YouTube uploads your video and eats all the costs for the infrastructure. They then make that money back, and more, by selling ads. They can calculate what the value of each stream is for advertisers. With STORE, there is no ad engine. Rather, the content has a business model set by the creator, and users can pay to consume it. If we do this right, we can use smart contracts to replace much of the economic framework of the entertainment industry. 

Lastly in Engineering, the team completed a development and QA sprint on the recently shipped royalties functionality in the NFT publisher flow. Users can now use our templates to easily build out both simple, and industry-specific smart contracts for providing royalties on NFT sales of all types. We believe that smart contracts that manage royalty payments on items such as books, music, video, and other digital goods can replace the middlemen who manage these processes today while taking their own fees. All while making the experience more transparent and user-friendly for the end-user. 

Operations

Recently, the team has been revamping both the standard deck and a one-pager elevator pitch to showcase the recent progress made in Engineering. The new materials also hone our core mission, as well as introduce new use cases that we've developed to support A.I. models and decentralized video on the protocol. We believe STORE is uniquely positioned to capitalize on these new use cases. The revised deck is currently undergoing third party reviews with individuals who have seen a lot of success in the crypto and web3 spaces. Their feedback is tough and honest, but vital to building bulletproof messaging.

One of the catalysts for updating our messaging, specifically our one-pager, is our ongoing collaboration with CoinTelegraph through their Pitch Room channel. These marketing materials, along with the new deck, will effectively communicate our mission and accomplishments outside of our core community and Twitter. This is the first time the project has truly gone public with what we’ve been up to and we are excited to see the results and will keep the community informed as more information becomes public.

And now for a little bit of housekeeping. After two years of legal processes and waiting, the project now has approval for a U.S. trademark for the STORE brand. Going forward, the project has the rights to the STORE Protocol moniker. We have previously used this term to refer to the comprehensive scope of the STORE project, including the network, governance, applications, APIs, and all the various components that make up the protocol. Moving forward, we will continue to use this name in an official capacity.

Lastly, please keep an eye out in August for the next State of STORE address from Chris. It will include updates on all components of the project, along with a recorded demo of recent functionality such as the Transaction History API for permanent storage.

Wrap-Up

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/hqcw598kjqt62azz

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

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