$STORE Community Update — January 2022

Picking up where we left off in the new year as STORE builds the new crypto cloud of Web3.

Our team got right back into the swing of things in January, continuing efforts on the international foundation, engineering, governance, and more. We expect 2022 to be a big year for the Store project. Let’s dive right into this month’s update.

Building the Foundation

Throughout January, we continued to execute our strategic plan to set up a non-US Foundation by finalizing the burn-down plan with legal and tax experts through Liechtenstein if Switzerland isn’t feasible. As Store’s path forward requires the launch of a Foundation, we’ve set a deadline at the end of Q1 2022 to decide where to launch the Foundation.

While Switzerland is certainly an enticing location to house the Foundation, Liechtenstein is quietly building quite possibly the most robust and thoughtful legal framework for blockchain companies in the world. It’s also part of the EEA, which would enable Store to be active in the EU market as a compliant entity. Setting up this foundation is not an impossible task of course, but the transition does have real regulatory and tax implications that require deep consideration to do it right.

Strides in Operations and Development

In parallel with the foundation, Stores’s product development is moving on full cylinders. We’ve onboarded even more engineers to develop tooling for governance applications and the Store Cloud. Connecting legal code to software code is increasingly important because as Store engineering is ramping up tooling with smart contract prototyping, this convergence of law and software is critical for Store’s launch of governance as a critical piece in the path to the token’s utility.

We’ve seen a huge increase in productivity due to a greater focus on operational infrastructure. Strategic planning, product development, and operational scale are starting to converge, putting Store on schedule to hit important milestones.

Building Governance Through Research

Store’s research on trust is advancing under the leadership of the Head of Policy- Crypto and Governance, Craig Montuori. Additionally, governance research now includes different disciplines to inform trust minimization that will be published in upcoming materials. Although not quite ready for publication or pre-print, we look forward to sharing these papers for public comment and feedback.