STORE Community Update - June 2023

Greetings, community! We have reached the end of Q2, as well as the halfway point of 2023, and we are proud to state what a great year it has been for the project. The engineering team has been shipping new products and iterations weekly as we build out the full suite of functionality to support all the STORE use cases. This includes VM architecture, UI/UX design, database build-outs, and APIs to tie it all together. With the upcoming State of STORE address and the associated demo, we’re excited to share all this fun progress with you. Meanwhile, our Operations team has also been hard at work. With the recent addition of two new partners, we’re in a better place than ever to support the work that will need to be done to go to market and produce token-generating events.

‍Engineering

Earlier this month, STORE announced new details on the Store Cloud VM, and we are pleased to announce that progress has continued with the additions of a few more components. The team has completed designs on how pricing will be articulated for all resource types (run-time compute, perpetual storage, etc.). The Store Oracle will express pricing and resource availability from the VM in its API with the following data: sell price, replication factor, governance endowments, developer endowments, and Powered by Store endowments (more on this product later). 

STORE has always followed an API-first approach and we now have all of STORE running on its own cloud infrastructure using these APIs. We’re practicing what we preach, and so far, it’s working for us and we’re confident it will work for others to build on when we launch. To reiterate, none of our cloud infrastructure is hosted on centralized public clouds such as AWS, Azure, Hetzner, and others. This is in contrast to many other “web3” projects that utilize these services, which inherently prevents true decentralization. This is a topic we have written about previously and a message we will continue to stand strong on.

Speaking of the Store Oracle, since its initial release back in January, Engineering has continued iterating on the tool. A recent addition is the ability to query the tool against a network of 3rd-party pricing oracles in order to attain the pricing for STORE’s resource offerings in multiple currencies such as BTC, ETH, USD, and more. Additionally, the team has built out the data tables for permanent storage and the API set for sending transaction history. The data stored here includes server-level storage information, network economics, price subsidies, and storage size amounts. The data is accessible via the API for STORE Chain blocks, NFT assets and their associated metadata, as well as LLMs (Large Language Models). We’ll be fine tuning the Store Oracle, as well as completing the build out of the billing APIs to access this data over the next week, as we get it ready to be included in the live demo that will be released alongside the State of STORE publication.

As part of building out a full ecosystem to support all the use cases STORE is primed to address, designing user-friendly UIs that allow our users and partners to interact with our applications successfully is vital. To that end, the team has made significant progress across a number of applications that will pair with the infrastructure we discussed above to create best-in-class experiences for our web3 use cases. In particular, we’ve focused this month on the latest version of our blockchain explorer where we’ve added the ability for NFT publishers to add royalty payments to their assets built into STORE smart contracts. These smart contracts have a variety of flavors including the standard set, royalties for music, royalties for books, and more.

The engineering progress on tooling remains strong, with multiple design prints currently running simultaneously on items such as analytics, NFT publisher, and governance. Store Explorer is currently in a QA phase as the team makes minor bug fixes to the latest set of functionality added, focusing on NFT distribution settings, royalties, and more. Design work is wrapping up here with the next development sprint set to begin in July. Next up for the team will be improvements to the perpetual storage offering. In addition, the team has been honing the designs for governance, STORE Launch, cloud billing, and more.

Finally, an update on Store Chain, a longer-term project that we’re excited to see integrate with the decentralized cloud offering that we’ve already built out significantly. After delivering a v0.1 version of the consensus mechanism in May, Rag and the team are making healthy progress towards the delivery of the v0.2 version of Chain, which we expect to ship in the next month or two. Utilizing Rust for development, our engineers are crafting a high-performance, pipelined, and paralleled BFT consensus algorithm that we call BlockFinBFT. This consensus mechanism will support many of STORE’s primary use cases, including the decentralization of data, such as with AI models. As development progresses, expect to hear more from our team about how STORE plans to utilize datacoins to represent data on STORE and make it tradable and consumable across the decentralized applications built on the STORE platform.

Operations

After the onboarding of our new token distribution partner, Pulley, STORE has found another key partner in the form of a Bay-area account firm that can act as our Treasury operations manager. In this role, they would be a 3rd party responsible for executing our token sends independently of the Store Association. This firm would be positioned within the Treasury Branch of Store Governance to ensure all operations are above board and meet regulatory and compliance rules. Along with Pulley, this is a big step towards launching in a manner that keeps the project compliant and well-organized.

Lastly, a recap of the exciting news that we shared the previous week regarding STORE getting the opportunity to be a part of Pitch Room, a collaboration with noted independent crypto media organization CoinTelegraph that matches venture capitalists and private equity managers with innovative crypto projects to explore new possibilities in web3 and disrupt the industry.

The collaboration between STORE and CoinTelegraph would center around our new product, Powered by Store. This program, which we unveiled a few weeks back, allows users to run various projects (mobile app and site hosting) on STORE and provides the analytics to track their success. As an extra bonus, our branding will be featured on these products, one of the first steps to get STORE's name out into the world. With our recent development sprints on this product, it’s in a prime state to be unveiled and utilized with a partner such as CoinTelegraph.

For more information on Pitch Room, please visit: https://cointelegraph.com/news/cointelegraph-pitch-room-launched-bridging-promising-projects-to-quality-investors

‍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/uv6qfx45kg2uy6nf

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

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