What are Initial Mining Auctions?

What role do miners play on the network?

1. Form the zero-fee settlement layer, whereby “markets” of miners are formed (generally consisting of 17 miners per market)

2. Secure the zero-fee settlement layer by collecting & validating transactions, as well as finalizing blocks to guarantee the transactions can be trusted.

3. Participate in governance and voting proposals to upgrade the protocol to a p2p cloud computing platform and power the data economy via tokenized data

How are miners chosen on STORE?

//STORE uses an auction process called Initial Mining Auctions (IMA) to fill validation and storage miner positions (auctions are held separately for both of these types).

At a high-level, the auction takes place in the 3 steps and with specific requirements around the bid amount and Security Budget (please refer to Storecloud First Governance for more detail around the Security Budget)

Step 1 - $STORE owners compete in Initial Mining Auctions

STORE governance sets the security budget (SB) and minimum bid for each blind and anonymous IMA. Every quarter, governance votes on adding new Markets too.

Step 2 - Top bidders need to pass 1 entity 1 vote check

If there is 1 new Market being opened, then the 17 top bidders win the IMA, but they must be trusted as 1e1v by $STORE miners before joining the Market.

If they are not trusted by 2/3 of all active $STORE miners, then the next highest bidder must gain trust in 1e1v before joining the Market.

If there’s a 1e1v violation, after a 2/3 governance vote, the miner is 100% slashed and removed by fellow miners from the Market and therefore STORE itself.

Step 3 - Miners begin to earn block rewards

Earning Power is proportional to the amount of their total $STORE staked relative to all other miners but each miner is limited by a single vote in governance (1e1v). Earnings are also capped by the SB (voted on by governance).

Before governance is ratified and before a peaceful transfer of power takes place, STORE Labs will determine the # of Markets, minimum bid size, and security for each founding launch auction.