STORE Community Update — November & December 2022
Project updates across engineering, operations, and governance for STORE Cloud, STORE Chain, and more.
A wild November in crypto that will have repercussions down the line. The collapse of FTX, and the associated fallout, left the crypto market reeling as it put a punctuation mark (or two) on a tough year in the asset class.
Thankfully, the STORE project had no exposure to FTX or Alameda, though the impact of these events is still felt across the industry.
As centralized entities around us fail due to corruption and other human factors, the importance of STORE’s message of a decentralized cloud and web3 is more apparent than ever.
STORE has survived crypto bear markets before and is poised to do so again, thanks to the tireless efforts focused on building and supporting our community. As the complete picture of the SBF fraud becomes known, private markets are picking back up — good news for STORE. Chris has multiple meetings set up following the holidays as the CAPEX push continues.
Now, to the team updates.
The STORE Engineering team continues its mission to vertically integrate its high-speed cloud, blockchain, and decentralized governance offerings. Over the past two months, the team has achieved significant progress in getting the infrastructure code production ready while developing a comprehensive testing suite for operational readiness.
The primary engineering focus in Q1 ’23 is the STORE Oracle, which delivered an initial prototype in early December. The Oracle will be a hub for all the economics logic the team has compiled through R&D over the last year. With hundreds of APIs, it will power the STORE platform across Explorer, Cloud, and Chain. The prototype is currently in performance testing, with additional dashboarding added in parallel.
Speaking of STORE Chain, progress is coming along there as well. The Engineering team created a local dev environment to begin debugging, indexing features and working on API development. On a side note, STORE Chain development is being transitioned from Python to Rust to improve the performance and security of the network.
In addition to all this remarkable work, STORE wrote “Store It,” immutable storage with cross-cloud compatibility into Ethereum, IPFS, and Store Cloud. The product is currently going through QA testing. It’s a significant achievement, and STORE is excited to share it with the community soon.
Looking forward to Q1 2023, STORE R&D is hyperactive on multiple fronts, including designing the economics of the Virtual Machine for STORE Chain and smart contracts, cloud billing, tooling for decentralized Governance, specifying compute requirements for nodes, and more.
New in the backlog is “Invest,” a chance for STORE miners to exchange STORE computing resources for tokens of developers building on STORE. Over the long term, this is the direction STORE is headed — it’s our re-imagination of the cloud (with tokens).
A couple of quick notes on Governance before wrapping up. The initial wireframes for committees to organize the inflow of change proposals have been completed as the team looks ahead to a fully decentralized governance model. The team is also preparing whitepapers on STORE’s governance model and its novel “Trust-Your-Network” process for achieving 2/3rd+ trust amongst nodes. This process underpins STORE’s commitment to the one entity: one vote model for governance voting.
In addition to all the engineering and governance developments, we’re also improving our internal processes, including documentation and cataloging, to increase velocity and quality as the product shipment increases. Furthermore, this documentation will help onboard new employees as STORE continues to add to its Engineering team. Finally, tax, legal, and compliance remain a high priority as STORE moves into 2023 with all items squared away.
To close this out, a quick note on fundraising. CAPEX remains the primary operational focus as the team pivots to the second phase of the funding raise. STORE has made significant progress on the token sale and is in advanced discussions with multiple potential partners.
With the help of the STORE community, the next round of funding will keep the project on track to launch the STORE Foundation, a critical milestone in manifesting $STORE token availability on public exchanges. This fundraising will carry the project far into 2023 and beyond.
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.