AMA with Store

7 min readDec 30, 2020

Nebo: Hi Chris, thanks a lot for your time! Hope you are well.

Chris: Hello Nebo

Nebo: Okay let’s start. Thank you for accepting our invitation. Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your role within STORE?

Chris: Thanks for the invitation to discuss STORE. I’m Chris co-creator of the project.

Nebo: Awesome, what’s your background and how did you come up with STORE?

Chris: It’s been a journey. Not a huge fan of talking about myself.

Nebo: Haha that’s alright. How did STORE start?

Chris: STORE started because I couldn’t program with bitcoin in 2013/2014 and kind of gave up on it as a programmable payments network. I didn’t think Vitalik was right about layer 2 in 2014/2015 so left the space. While building a multi-tier communication system for franchise and chain stores, it was clear zero-fee value transfer was needed for communications in those complex business environments to have an environment to be transformed. “Storecoin” started and the first problem we solved was zero-fee. From there, we kept designing through what is now, a decentralized zero fee computer.

When we started, we believed the public internet needed a zero-fee, p2p, highly programmable payments network.

As our researched evolved and we played the incentive out, we realized the problem we were solving for was high-performance, energy rich decentralized zero-fee compute.

It’s been a journey.

Nebo: Interesting, So Store was born in 2017 correct? How is product development going? Has it been tested/used?

Chris: Formally 2017, yes.

Our team is making really solid progress across the computer. We’re writing the next version of BlockFinBFT now, preparing to write p2p storage with several different competing teams, and are finalizing the economic and governance tooling for our upcoming First Governance test network.

Nebo: Can you briefly explain BlockFinBFT?

Chris:

Chris: We’re *very* excited about BlockFinBFT

Nebo: I see, BlockFinBFT is a multi-tier network of Validation miners and storage miners — that’s an innovative approach.

Chris:

Chris: Here’s the economic throughput of the market we’re in (cloud computing)

Nebo: Crypto is very tiny indeed. There’s a lot of room to grow.

Chris: Scaling decentralized compute at a price point that serious developers will pay for hasn’t been solved.

Nebo: Agreed!

Nebo: Are there any direct competitors to STORE?

Nebo: Exciting. I hear that TGE is around the corner. What can we expect from STORE in the near future? What are your plans?

Chris: We’re making progress.

Nebo: I’m sure many are looking forward to STORE’s launch!

What’s the utility of STORE token?

Chris: Our first release will be First Governance of which we expect to conduct our first auction in Q1 or Q2 2021. We’re racing for it.

Nebo: Interesting.

Chris: STORE is effectively an incentivized democracy — both on chain and off.

We’ll be able to test the economics of the computer while framing a lot of the tooling and processes for an actual ratified decentralized democracy.

Leaderless economics produce different second order effects than zero sum, winner takes all games.

We’re pioneering some important experiments with First Governance.

We’re very excited about it.

Nebo: Looks very solid indeed. We’re looking forward to it as well.

I’m sure the community has a lot of questions to ask so let’s have them!

Member 1: Is the team fully focused and committed for a long term run?
1. Do you have specific plans for retention key staff?
2. Attracting new talent in the long run?
3. Have specific succession strategies in case of losing key resources?

Chris: Thanks for the question, it’s a vital one for the long-term survivability and success of a decentralized cloud protocol.

Project co-creators vest for 8-years — we’ve been long-term oriented from day one and will remain that way for the history of our tenure in the project. Advisors and team also vest (2–4 year periods).

This last half of the year, we’ve had a lot of our core team come alongside the project and help us prepare it for the next phase by earning and vesting $STORE tokens alone. It’s been rather magical to build easily the most talented team I’ve ever worked with in this way. There’s a lot of internal belief in what we’re doing.

We’ve crafted a decentralized monetary system that ensures STORE and its four branches of governance will perpetually be funded with block rewards, enabling STORE to theoretically survive forever.

My challenge as CEO is helping us get into a position where the value of those rewards fully fund Opex (research, engineering, governance, community, growth, etc. etc) — over the long-term. I view this as my #1 objective as CEO and co-creator.

I think we can do it — but it’s a BIG challenge as we don’t know if it’s ever been done before.

Member 2: Dear Chris, you shared a fascinating graphic hours ago about Value of Crypto Block Rewards and Public Cloud Revenues.

It seems 2020 figures are between 150–200 usd. This was something you expected? And guess for 2021 ending?

Chris: Thanks — that graphic has a lot of insider crypto interested. I shared it yesterday for the first time but we’re doing a bit of clean-up before we let it go to a wider audience.

My basic assumption if the demand for decentralized computing resources grows, the energy required to produce the compute grows, and therefore the marginal cost to produce a token increases. If MC > MR (marginal cost > marginal revenue), then the chain dies. So I assume if there is indeed utility to build on top of decentralized clouds, then the value of the block reward should grow.

Member 3: There we see many projects that claims they are fully Decentralized. But they done their work in a Centralized way. How can we sure that $STORE is fully Decentralized? Can you please tell us what’s $STORE working method?

Chris: This is as much as a philosophical question as a computer science question.

Our belief is if the computing resources powering are 2/3 fault tolerant, that consensus is decentralized. For the computing network itself to be decentralized 2/3 fault tolerant off chain governance needs to emerge.

We’re aiming to solve both.

Member 4: The most critic point that any payment gateway platforms related with FIAT must affront are the legal issues, so can you speak about the regulatory terms that STORE handle?

Chris: A LOT. And we’re doing our best to stay compliant with the regulatory bodies, respect all local laws of the countries we eventually operate in (might be 4), and pay our taxes.

We’ve invested a lot into compliance. Our next challenge is to re-create what we’ve done for our US entity to a Singaporean entity.

Member 5: I couldn’t be able to read Britepaper as unreachable. I also can’t see any information on Coingecko & Coinmarketcap. There is just an info on IcoBench that 3,500,000 USD value tokens sold.

Could you tell your tokenomics story?

Chris: