STORE Community Update - October & November 2023
The engineering projects keep rolling and we're nearing release of our new technical demo, including the much awaited State of STORE.
Happy Thanksgiving to all those celebrating in the U.S. It’s been a busy past couple of months as the team continues to press forward on a collection of engineering projects while simultaneously working on a new introductory video which will demonstrate the capabilities of the Store Protocol. This content will be invaluable as Store seeks to move into the public light more in the next few months, as well as accelerating our fundraising efforts.
As crypto again beings to gain momentum new projects such as STORE are rising to the surface. Most recently, the project received a positive shout-out in the Blockworks newsletter. It's an encouraging sign to have others recognize the importance of the new computing paradigm that STORE is championing and will bring to the table in 2024.
Engineering
In September, we introduced the ability to purchase more bandwidth or "views" for an asset. This is a revolutionary concept in crypto as we have yet to see a decentralized CDN, and a rival to ad-based services such as YouTube. Since then, we have been iterating on the implementation. Recent updates include: updating the logic for minting NFTs in large collections, enhancements to the user-interface navigation to move between various versions of the same issued asset, tracking of the number of asset views used, community members funding bandwidth, and upgrading the metadata associated with these transactions. Additionally, we’ve updated our front-end to enhance how we display to users their current bandwidth available and recent transactions. Our goal is to provide a user interface that rivals the best and most user-friendly e-commerce experiences.
To facilitate the growth of this community-powered bandwidth program, Store has created an infrastructure fund that financially incentives the wider community to help pay for the bandwidth budgets of assets like artwork or movies. Contributors to the fund will receive a portion of the 2.5% royalty from the profits of the assets they choose to fund. Their bandwidth funding helps offset the costs for creators getting started. This decentralized CDN infrastructure fund aims to make it easier for creators to distribute their work while rewarding community members who chip in to support the network infrastructure.
Continuing with Store NFT Publisher, iterations continue as the team updates the application's underlying architecture. The goal of this update is to best handle updates to existing assets, such as purchasing more bandwidth or updating a royalties agreement. This architecture change will make it seamless for a user to make these changes via our UI while our code handles the updates to a history database table and updates to the metadata file.
Moving to the Store Oracle which powers our API suite, Store has begun redesigning some of its APIs and permanent storage services to better support smart contracts for royalties in the entertainment industry and other use cases. Unlike traditional business contracts that can be amended, smart contracts are immutable. So Store needed a way to permanently store each contract's history and version changes to track which ones are active. This re-architecture introduces a form of version control for smart contracts.
Last week, we shared updates on the Oracle API suite we've built to support monetary policy. This week, our engineers have been working on the Treasury APIs. We've engineered the logic down to the per bit level for maximum accuracy when tracking real-time fluctuations in the Store economy. While more work lies ahead, this granular approach aligns with our goal of making the pricing feeds as detailed as possible while accounting for current network conditions.
On the research front, we are laying the groundwork for smart contracts within STORE NFT. But first, we are restructuring the APIs powering our storage service to improve modularity. After the redesign, we will begin the next permanent storage and programming phase - creating smart contracts to ensure token economies for data, content, and eventually AI NFTs can self-execute on STORE infrastructure.
After months of monetary policy research and modeling, our engineers have started codifying that knowledge. We're drafting monetary policy APIs for the Store Oracle suite and turning our economic logic into code. We are also refactoring the overall API architecture to enhance performance and development velocity going forward, accelerating progress in future sprints.
Elsewhere in Engineering, the team is finishing development on its latest permanent storage build, the first computing and storage service launched on the Store platform. In addition, the team led by Rag continues building Store Chain in Rust, adding more miners to test plans and enabling Store Chain to run on Store Cloud infrastructure. Next up, the team is set to begin a 3-month development-and-testing cycle focusing on building out the peer-to-peer networking aspect of Chain, a vital component of Store’s dual consensus model.
Finally, the team has started designing the front-end for BFT ID for Governance, as well as the UI for Store Auctions as we shift to prepare onboarding tools. The latter application will allow interested parties to bid for Miner seats on the Store Protocol. This will integrate neatly with our BFT ID and Store Registration tools that we have previously previewed. Once the in-depth designs are complete and have been vetted they will be moved to development as our recently built royalties framework and treasury APIs have been developed.
Operations
Moving to the video demo, we’re currently in a recording sprint as we record new sections to add to the 15-minute version of the demo. This is in addition to the long-form version we recorded previously. This newer, shorter version, is great for those new to Store who wish to learn about the project in an easy-to-consume format that can be digested in a quick sitting. Our focus here is to illustrate what problems we’re trying to solve, how we reached our approach to the solution, and of course showing the products we’ve built over the last year that match functionality to theory. We’re excited to share this new video and the associated State of STORE publication with our community and the greater crypto community in December. Thank you to everyone who has helped shape these videos and their feedback.
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