STORE Community Update - May 2023

Intro

The fog is beginning to lift, both over our native home in the Bay Area, as well as over the crypto industry. As things begin to settle down following the tumultuous times of last year, progress continues to be momentous. Recent shipments of the Store Oracle, Explorer, Chain, and more have contributed to this positive trend. Additionally, this year’s Consensus conference in Austin proved to be an excellent opportunity to generate interest in the project as we take a more public-facing stance. It’s been a strong start to the year, and May was no exception. Let’s dig into the updates!

Engineering

A primary focus of the team has been the continued iterations on the Store Oracle. This past month, a couple significant changes were made, including the logic to convert computing resources sold from STORE cloud billing into $STORE tokens in real-time, plus the ability to accurately account for generated protocol revenue. Furthermore, the team has developed a new API design that we’ll be using moving forward that provides more flexibility and shorter development cycles moving forward. We have already begun using it on the latest suite of monetary policy APIs, and we’ll continue its use as we develop transaction history APIs that deliver data on all facets of Store Cloud usage. Next on our agenda is integrating this data flow into Store Explorer to deliver real-time pricing in a user-facing tool.

Speaking of Explorer, we’ve been busy the last few weeks making a series of iterations on this public-facing application. Recently, QA completed a testing sprint on the new functionalities recently added to the tool. These include additions to the NFT publisher flow such as managing royalty payments, setting IP and copyright permissions, creating distribution methods, and more. Explorer will be the central tool tying together all facets of STORE for the consumer of STORE’s resource offerings, much the same way that the Oracle ties together the different development resources of the network for creators and developers.

In addition to Explorer, significant progress has been made across a number of other applications. The front-end UIs for the Governor, Developer, and Oracle applications are nearing completion, with a recent testing phase having cleaned up the few remaining bugs. This set of tools will provide end-users with a seamless onboarding experience onto the STORE protocol, enabling them to start interacting with our products and APIs. The most recent addition to this suite of tooling is Analytics or “Powered by STORE”. We recently discussed the code snippet the team has developed that can be embedded into websites running their infrastructure on STORE. This snippet allows STORE to track usage and provides links back to STORE as a way to promote our brand. It will be an integral part of our marketing and distribution strategy. Powered by STORE Analytics offers a user-friendly means of allowing our future partners, who host their infrastructure on STORE, to track metrics such as page visits, sessions, clicks, and more. Think of it as a decentralized Google Analytics.

Lastly in Engineering, an update on Chain, one of our longer-term projects. In early May, Rag and the team completed version 0.1, a significant achievement considering the complexity of the technology. Since then, our engineers have addressed minor security vulnerabilities, refined the Rust code, and made further enhancements. In June, we’re expecting to ship version 0.2 of Store Chain, an accomplishment that has been aided by our use of GPT-4 to augment our development capabilities. BlockFinBFT, STORE’s consensus mechanism is a high-performance and pipelined Dynamic Proof-of-Stake algorithm that builds blocks in parallel to reduce transaction times. This consensus mechanism will support one of STORE’s primary use cases, which is the decentralization of data, including AI models. As development progresses, expect to hear more from our team about how the project plans to use datacoins to represent data on the network and make it tradable and consumable across the decentralized applications built on the STORE platform.

Operations

Moving on, you’re likely already familiar with our new buy bot, Foggy the Bot, if you have been active on our Telegram channel. With our recent fundraising push, Foggy has been actively syndicating $STORE token purchases to the community, along with other project updates. Expect to see more of Foggy as the project increases its visibility and prepares to spend more time publicizing our achievements.

The Operations team has also been busy finalizing deals to onboard new technical and financial partners to the project. In April, we announced the partnership with Pulley to manage our Treasury and token distributions. This month, we began the work to bring on a local Bay Area-based accounting firm. This team would work with the Treasury Branch of Store Governance to ensure all operations are above board and meet regulatory and compliance rules. Along with the introduction of Pulley, this is a significant step towards launching the project in a manner that is compliant and well-organized.

In Governance, the collaboration between Store Research and its legal partners in Switzerland continues to be fruitful. Together, we are designing the structure for the Store Association, which will serve as the anchor of Store Second Governance, essentially the test net for Store Governance as we transition to a fully decentralized model. The goal is for Second Governance, along with the newly built Store Association, to launch in Q4 this year. Once established, it will drive progress in other areas of the project as we approach token-generating events.

Lastly, the State of STORE draft is nearing completion and requires just a few more edits before publication. Similar to previous versions, this piece aims to provide an intimate portrayal of the project, highlighting recent accomplishments, our current position, and where we are going. We look forward to sharing it with the community soon, likely in the first half of June.

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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