STORE Community Update - December through February 2024

Welcome to 2024, STORE Team! We’re off to a great start this year as the team pushes forward across a number of fronts in what promises to be a huge year for the project. 2023 was about surviving the bear market and we’re happy to report we have come out unscathed and well positioned to take advantage of the rising tide in web3 and DePIN, specifically. Without further ado, let’s review what we’ve accomplished over the past few months.

Engineering

In February, we embarked on a comprehensive 6-month engineering initiative, prioritizing the enhancement of the infrastructure underpinning our decentralized service offerings. In recent weeks, we have diligently crafted a meticulous project plan, allocated resources judiciously, and finalized our system architecture. Following a thorough technical evaluation of the proposed architecture at the conclusion of January, development activities across a number of engineering sprints have been completed or are in progress as of the time of this update.

Next up, we have sprints planned across infrastructure accounting, augmentation of multi-currency support for payments, enhancements to permanent storage capabilities, implementation of NFT "editing" functionalities (Dynamic NFTs), development of a dedicated STORE wallet, and numerous other enhancements. In March, one of our primary focuses will be the development of smart contracts for the Oracle API. The culmination of these collective endeavors, upon successful execution, is poised to significantly elevate our competitive standing in the market.

On the economics and monetary policy side, we are pleased to announce that the architectural design and development of the primary database supporting our First Treasury has been completed. Our focus will now shift towards the development of Second Treasury, which will manage the project's funds under protocol governance in its subsequent phase. These databases will serve as the backbone for the Store Oracle APIs, that seamlessly integrate all aspects of the protocol.

Another recent accomplishment is the significant progress the team has made in increasing the payment options for cloud resources. We've expanded our capabilities to accept multiple currencies, including $STORE, STORE credits, ETH, and USDC. Moreover, users within applications built on STORE will now have the flexibility to utilize the native token of the respective application to purchase resources. This advancement not only facilitates diverse payment methods but also fosters the emergence of new business models and innovative products on the protocol.

Looking back, the team completed a project in December aimed to enhance our system architecture to accommodate Dynamic NFTs (dNFT). To summarize,a Dynamic NFT is an asset imbued with smart contract logic enabling it to revise its metadata in response to various factors such as alterations in areal-world asset, augmentation of the asset's STORE bandwidth, character advancement in a decentralized network-based game, among others. This will allow us to generate a comprehensive history log for assets stored on-chain,thereby introducing novel use cases to the realm of cryptocurrency.

Finally, the design and development teams continue to build the tooling that will power the many user-facing aspects of the protocol such as token registration, BFT ID for governance, and both auctions and staking for onboarding, plus much more. Once the high fidelity designs are complete and have been vetted, development will commence as part of the above-mentioned engineering roadmap.

In parallel with our engineering efforts, we have initiated a comprehensive, long-term research project. This project aims to explore how the protocol can incentivize developers and other users to contribute data for use in our LLMs and other A.I. models developed on the protocol. In return for sharing their data, these providers would be entitled to a portion of the revenues generated by the AI. A key challenge, not just for STORE but with all training data, lies in determining the value of these datasets, which ultimately dictates the share of AI revenues allocated to the data providers.

Another forward-looking Store Research project is an initiative into a revolutionary incentive model where users who help store files on the protocol in exchange earn a 2% royalty off of any revenues generated from the assets they help to house. This model, similar to our design on incentivizing bandwidth for assets, is how we shift the dynamic of a centralized cloud ecosystem to an Internet and data economy that becomes owned, monetized, and governed by the world -- not Big Tech.

Operations

Moving to operations, as we prepare for project launch, our focus will now expand to encompass the project governance activities required as a prerequisite for moving to the next phase of the project. In this light, we’ll be re-engaging with our legal team in Switzerland to begin the next phase and start preparing timelines and budget for the work required to establish the Store Association.

After months of edits, reviews, and re-recording we are now completed with our latest set of fundraising materials. The materials include a new project overview deck, our 15-minute video demonstration of the protocol, and our first-ever introductory one-pager. It’s taken multiple iterations to edit down all our content into a focused, highly engaging demonstration of what we’ve been working on, and we’re excited to share it soon. These materials will be broadcast with CoinTelegraph for their introduction of STORE via their PitchRoom project, published in our upcoming State of STORE address, as well as shared with prospective investors and partners.

Elsewhere, the Operations team is updating our processes for KYC for investors and onboarding registration as we prepare to add new investors and builders to the protocol in 2024 and beyond. This includes a new KYC partner, a registration and interest take-in form, and enhanced documentation.

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