About

Through its zero-fee settlement layer, the STORE token aims to become the dominant zero-fee cryptocurrency for the public internet. Through the Store p2p cloud, a new computing platform powered by open and tokenized data emerges. Not only do developers get paid when the Google's of the world want to query/crawl/ search their data, developers can quickly build new apps and ML/AI services with the open data streams and open APIs of other developers. On the STORE cloud, 1 MB of data = 1 datacoin emitted by tokenized apps (called tApps). Governance will be coordinated by checks and balances, separation of powers, and shared security (decentralized federalism).

History

The Store project was started in May 2017 with the initial goal of solving zero-fee, p2p, and censorship resistant payments inside of a messaging application for franchise and chain store businesses. As research evolved, the projects’ aim expanded into solving zero-fee payments for the public internet. It recognized the HTTP 402 Status Code of "Payment Required" could be natively solved with a scalable, decentralized, zero-fee cryptocurrency. The research team had numerous breakthroughs: in consensus with its two-tier BlockFin BFT consensus algorithm; in economics with its dynamic inflationary block rewards engine that can secure the blockchain without transaction fees; in governance with its checks and balances approach to enabling a p2p democracy; in tools and utilities to bring crypto-native payments to the internet, and more.

As research evolved further, building on Chris McCoy (creator) and Rag’s (CTO, co-founder) 2014 Bitcoin experiments in payments and monetizable APIs (which didn’t work) and then Chris’s work with the non-profit Data4America in structuring government data into JSON, the duo recognized Store’s zero-fee primitive as the foundation for tokenizing data. Research began in the middle of 2018 for Store’s p2p cloud computing platform where data transforms into zero-fee, programmable money . First designs were released in March 2019 and Chris shared his vision for tokenized data in a TechCrunch essay(http://(https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/15/the-inevitability-of-tokenized-data/ and then with Rag on a podcast with Tom Shaughnessy of Delphi Digital.

On the governance front, Store is currently facilitating a public peer review of its p2p democratic governance proposal. To-date, 70+ academics, builders, analysts, investors, and more are helping shape the proposal through a public email list. The public peer review will play an important role in helping Store ratify the proposal with its miners in the future. Once ratified, Store will be fully decentralized with regards to both a p2p protocol and the rules to upgrade the protocol.

Through this governance, Store ultimately aims to upgrade itself from p2p payments to a zero-fee p2p cloud computing platform where its dWorkers (miners) collectively become a new decentralized data hosting alternative. The data of web and mobile apps will be tokenized, represented by a private key, and decentralized directly into the Store public blockchain. Through these data-backed tokens (called datacoins), data as programmable, p2p money will be born.