STORE Community Update — March 2023

Every month it feels like we have good news to share on products delivered and shipped, as well as industry and macro events where we dodged a bullet. Previously, it had been Terra and FTX, and this month we saw a banking fiasco that left many in the lurch. Fortunately, STORE had no exposure to Silvergate Bank, SVB, or any other financial institution that suffered solvency issues recently. As the calendar turns to Spring, let’s look at what we’ve accomplished lately and what’s next.

Engineering

Towards the end of January, Engineering announced milestone deliveries with our Forever Storage and Oracle products. Since then, the team has been busy iterating on those products. Included in the recently deployed product enhancements is the completion of cross-chain issuance with perpetual storage on STORE Cloud to the Forever Storage offering.

Additionally, the team delivered updates on how blocks, transactions, and digital assets display on STORE Explorer. Next in development are new product features such as NFT royalties, co-ownership of assets, digital memberships, and more. As Engineering builds and deploys, we’ll continue to push these updates to STORE Explorer and Forever Storage tooling to our main website, as it now has this functionality across our entire storecloud.org domain. Through Explorer, users can view current network metrics, discover NFTs, view STORE Cloud details, and more.

The next phase of the STORE Oracle is in progress as well. After deploying the first collection of APIs in January, the team has continued to build towards launching an MVP (minimum viable product) of the Oracle in the following quarters. To that end, Engineering is developing a new set of economic and monetary policy APIs built on top of our novel pricing engine. This suite of APIs will be vital for how users of the STORE protocol purchase cloud resources and tie many facets of our ecosystem together. In parallel, the R&D team is making significant progress on pricing and expressing computing resources in $STORE, including GPU compute, to further our AI/ML use cases.

The evolution of STORE Chain carries on with Rag leading the effort to review and update the code base. Development proceeds in Rust as we align our code with the initial specs of BlockfinBFT, STORE’s novel proof-of-stake consensus algorithm. After code development, STORE plans to take BlockFinBFT through Jepsen security audits. Chain is a long-term vision for STORE, and we’ll keep the community updated as it progresses.

Next in the queue is the Developer platform, a best-in-class portal for onboarding developers onto the STORE Protocol. Initial design specs are approved, and development is to begin shortly. Looking forward, the team has also started work on STORE Cloud billing and pricing, Trust-Your-Network tooling for securing BFT ID, and STORE Launch (formerly STORE Invest). These projects will come to the front and center in the next few quarters as the Engineering team continues to work through the product roadmap.

Operations

Last week, the leadership and legal teams completed another round of reviews of the STORE Association, a key pillar of STORE decentralized governance, after reviewing feedback and questions from our legal counsel in Switzerland (potential future location). Our latest designs have been sent back to this team for their review. The design is elegantly simple, and we’re confident that we’ve found a legally enshrined means of providing a proper checks-and-balances governance involving all the parties that comprise STORE governance (miners, token holders, developers, STORE Research, Inc., Etc.).

Discussions continue with a potential partner to help manage the STORE Treasury. The partner’s technology offerings provide the rigid accounting standards but product flexibility we need to manage the $STORE token table and distribution, including a potential cold storage solution to provide enterprise-grade security to our end-users.

Concluding, the leadership team this month completed updates to our messaging on the STORE website and protocol deck and is drafting the quarterly “State of STORE” article to shed more details on progress made over the last few months and where STORE will head the remainder of this year. The team is excited to share this with the community as we look forward to continuing the solid start for the year. These new materials will be part of the next fundraising push, which begins again in April.

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