How do miners form the zero-fee settlement layer?

How do miners form the zero-fee settlement layer?

Once miners win an auction they must also go through a selection process called TYN (Trust your network) whereby they are approved/verified by peers on the network and the network participants validate that they only represent one entity and are who they say they are.

Like any technology, STORE will evolve over multiple phases.

Each phase will feature a mining auction to fill open mining positions for that phase. STORE will feature 3 to 4 founding mining auctions, beginning 2021 and will then feature ongoing quarterly auctions to grow the STORE Network.

Step 1 - $STORE owners become STORE miners with staking

Auctions are essentially used for participants to contribute stake to secure their participation and ensure they do not act maliciously on the network. They are held separately for STORE and Cloud miners.

To bolster the security of the protocol, winning the mining auction is not sufficient to become a miner, auction winners must also be trusted for STORE’s “one entity, one vote” (1e1v) governance with other winners as well as existing miners. Hence, a potential miner must lock up capital and also be approved by peers on the network to help mitigate gaming the system.

Step 2 - Miners form the zero-fee settlement layer

First, miners form Markets with 17 miners per Market. The purpose of a Market is to provide cost-effective, specialized services to developers on STORE.

Secondly, STORE Labs Inc. develops the software that miners will run to secure the blockchain. The software can be run with a one-click setup on public clouds such as AWS™. The software will be designed to work with staking-as-a-service providers like Staked.us

Finally, a network of Markets forms STORE’s zero-fee settlement layer.

Step 3 - Miners secure the zero-fee settlement layer

Securing the blockchain means collecting transactions (similar to bank or credit card transactions) into a bucket called a block, validating those transactions, and finally sealing the block to guarantee that those transactions can be trusted.

Miners receive rewards for every block they secure. This is the income miners will generate for staking on STORE.

Since all miners from all markets secure the settlement transactions, they earn block rewards based on their participation.

Step 4 - Miners upgrade to power the data economy

Storecloud aims to power the data economy, allowing data buyers, producers, developers and users to transact with each other without having to trust each other.

STORE will enable miners, developers and data creators to be profitable, instead of the uneven siloed value capture demonstrated in the massive valuations of internet companies, such as Facebook and Google.

The ability to tokenize data outside of these silos will drive a flywheel where this structured data can be efficiently allocated to machine learning models to drive unthinkable applications and services of the future.

To achieve this goal, the role of miners will grow from simply securing the network to voicing an opinion on its future. At the end of the final launch phase, STORE will have 10 Markets with 170 miners. At this stage, the miners have the critical mass to formally ratify governance on how to run and grow STORE.

Miners can vote to upgrade from zero-fee settlement layer to p2p cloud computing platform (also known as STORE platform) to enable richer functionality and support a wider array of use cases that power the data economy.

The upgrade to STORE platform has two distinct parts:

1. Upgrade the mining software to validate transactions originating from the STORE platform

2. Upgrade the mining infrastructure to support running data-rich applications and mine datacoins

Datacoins enable the data created and shared by applications to be tokenized, which allow users and developers to control the flow of value within their applications. Upgrading to STORE platform enables this.

Miners provide developers with the compute resources and other services they need to run data-rich applications and get paid in $STORE for providing their services.