STORE Community Update - September 2023

Happy fall season, Store Community! With the equinox behind us, we're bidding farewell to a successful summer and embracing the next chapter as we step into Q4 of the calendar year. Our team has been hard at work, developing new products like Store Auctions tools and fine-tuning previously launched features such as bandwidth views. As always, there's a lot happening, and in this update, we aim to provide a summary of our September activities.

Engineering

After launching our capability to purchase additional NFT views in Store Explorer back in August, we are thrilled to introduce "People-Powered Bandwidth," a decentralized content delivery service. This groundbreaking solution addresses the challenge of funding bandwidth for various tasks without relying on centralized entities driven by ad revenue, a common practice on platforms like YouTube. Besides the NFT asset issuer, who can purchase views both at the time of issuance and later, the community can collectively contribute to funding extra views. We've already rolled out these improvements to our QA environment and have successfully tested them using the Gorli network.

We’ll continue to iterate on this product over the next month, improving our payments flow and updating the bandwidth history table of transactions. In related developments, our team has achieved significant milestones over a two-week sprint focused on testing permanent storage. Next, we’ll turn our focus to storage of all kinds on the protocol, after focusing the past few months on NFT issuance and the storage of those asset types.

Moving to Store Chain, development progress continues with Rust as the primary programming language. Recent progress has left our team excited, with notable updates to the security protocol for encryption and resolution of an issue related to miner interactions within the network. Moreover, we conducted another round of code review with the assistance of AI to identify and rectify bugs, which have since been addressed. This week, our team undertook an infrastructure testing sprint to simulate the system's capacity to handle substantial transaction loads. Stay tuned for further details as we analyze the data from these tests.

Looking forward, we are excited to announce the successful completion of our inaugural wireframe prototype for Store Cloud Raise, previously referred to as Store Launch. This innovative application is set to streamline the process for $STORE token holders and stakers, facilitating the allocation of their capital to projects built on the STORE infrastructure.

Furthermore, our ongoing development efforts for tooling applications that support our primary focus on selling compute resources are progressing smoothly. Specifically, we are advancing our pricing mechanism and refining payment flows for end-users, enabling consumers to make purchases using various fiat and cryptocurrency options. Additionally, we are currently engaged in design sprints for front-end interfaces that will empower users to stake tokens, deposit tokens, and utilize automated staking, among other features.

Our iterative work on the cloud billing front-end continues to yield productive results. In our latest sprint, we have introduced the capability to pay for cloud resources through various methods. These payment options encompass $STORE tokens, as well as stablecoins like USDC and ETH. Looking ahead, we plan to expand our payment acceptance capabilities to include $USD as well.

Furthermore with Store billing, users will have the option to transact using "Credits," a groundbreaking concept unique to the STORE ecosystem. These credits serve as a virtual currency native to the protocol, offering versatility in various applications. They can be utilized for minting NFTs, acquiring bandwidth, and, as the inaugural use case, conducting permanent storage transactions. It's essential to note that these credits will maintain a 1:1 backing with the $STORE token, ensuring their inherent value and enabling seamless, real-time transactions with other crypto assets. Our next steps with Credits involve the development of APIs to open up more use cases for Credits, as well as expanding the utility of credits to encompass additional Store Cloud resource types, such as GPUs and CPUs.

Shifting our focus to the Store Treasury, our team remains dedicated to refining the network's monetary policy, with the ultimate goal of establishing a transparent, auditable policy characterized by minimal inflation and sustainable incentives that will fuel the protocol for generations to come (over 100 years). Recent enhancements to the Store Oracle have prompted updates to our treasury APIs, ensuring the widespread availability of this critical data across the entire protocol. All these efforts align with our overarching mission to drive cryptocurrency transactions to the application layer, fostering innovation and adoption.

Lastly, our developers have dedicated their efforts this week to seamlessly integrating CodiumAI, a state-of-the-art tool for test coverage. This tool holds the promise of significantly elevating our testing capabilities, enabling us to harness the potential of AI-driven automation. Our objective is to enhance the precision and efficiency of our testing procedures, pinpoint specific areas in our codebase that may require further attention, and share performance metrics with our team members, thereby facilitating more effective tracking of our development and testing sprints.

We have successfully applied this tool to our permanent storage APIs, achieving nearly 90% coverage, as well as to our Oracle APIs. We have also undertaken similar endeavors with ChatGPT-4 for Store Chain, also to great effect. The combination of CodiumAI for testing and the utilization of GPT-4 for code development has propelled us to operate at unprecedented speeds, allowing us to deliver products with remarkable efficiency.

Operations

This week, we prepped all necessary materials for a latest demo of our work with CoinTelegraph’s Pitch Room. This demo includes a voiceover script we drafted that walks viewers through both the history of the project and a demonstration of our latest product and protocol features. To complement this demo, we’ve created a concise one-pager explanation of the project that will be released in coordination with our Pitch Room unveiling. The process has been challenging, involving multiple rounds of writing, rewriting, editing, and condensing. However, it has distilled our product message to its core and will serve as a valuable tool for future presentations, fundraising rounds, and more.

In addition, we've been working diligently to complete our most recent engineering builds to include them in the aforementioned demo. It's been a sprint to ensure everything is thoroughly tested and ready for presentation, but it has also demonstrated our team's agility and ability to perform under pressure. We eagerly anticipate sharing these new materials with our community and the broader tech and crypto world when our Pitch Room session launches soon.

Lastly for this month, work continues in the realm of Governance. The team is actively engaged in thorough internal evaluations of our early BFT ID prototype, a crucial element of our decentralized governance system. Our governance expert is meticulously scrutinizing the designs to ensure their alignment with the specifications we previously outlined. This rigorous approach underscores our unwavering dedication to fostering a robust and highly effective governance framework within our ecosystem. It’s one of the most important innovative ideas STORE is bringing to the industry and is something the team believes deeply in.

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

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