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Breeze Tumblebit Server Experimental Release

Breeze TumbleBit Server is Ready to Test!
The highly anticipated alpha version of the Breeze TumbleBit Server has now been released for testing. As promised, we have been engaging in a process of incremental deliveries and in this opportunity we want to share some technical details of the release. We expect to provide even more details both from an user and an operator perspective in the weeks to come. So, stay tuned!
This release showcases the Stratis secure node advertisement protocol, which will be utilised by the Breeze wallet to locate Breeze Tumblebit servers without the need for a centralised list. This is therefore a trustless registration mechanism resistant to manipulation or censorship.
Node advertisement protocol
A high level overview of the protocol operations performed by each Breeze Tumblebit server is as follows:
1. The node operator starts up the Breeze Tumblebit Server software.
2. The node checks to see if it has registered itself on the Stratis blockchain before.
3. If it has, the tumbler service is initialised as normal.
4. If the node is not yet registered, or if its configuration has changed, the registration transaction updates and broadcast again.
Registration transaction

The registration transaction is a specially-formatted transaction broadcast by the Breeze Tumblebit Server to the Stratis network. In this release, the registration transactions are broadcast to the main Stratis blockchain.
Security features

The registration transaction contains the following information embedded inside it:
1. The IP address of the Breeze Tumblebit Server.
2. (Currently optional) TOR address of the server.
3. The port that wallets should use to connect.
4. All the information is signed by the tumbler’s private keys. This means that the signatures can be validated by a Breeze wallet when it connects to the Breeze Tumblebit Server. The registration protocol will greatly benefit from widespread testing by the Stratis community.
As this is alpha software, the tumbler is currently configured to only operate on the Bitcoin testnet. This is to prevent loss of funds in the event of errors. Once the tumbler is sufficiently stable a Bitcoin mainnet version will be released.
Please reach out to our team of developers on Slack with your bug reports, suggestions and comments.

Stratis Development Update and Progress (28)


We are happy to share our developing process with all of you today; a first ‘sprint’ effort brought to you by our developers. This is just an update, there might be a follow up announcement next week with more specific details.
Bug fixing
A lot has changed in the UI and we’ve done our best to fix all the bugs and to incorporate all the suggestions that you’ve raised (if they made sense ;))
Notably:
– New loading page
– Add error handling to send modal
– Add send confirmation modal
– Add logout confirmation
– Add context menu to copy paste (fixes OS X copy pasting as well)
– Add SCSS source files to the repository
– Improve setup menu’s design and error handling
– Require strong passwords and password confirmation
– Fix daemon loading when there’s spaces in the path
– Various small improvements, bug fixes
Breeze and Full Node
Between the sprint planning and the onboarding of new contributors, we’ve actually managed to write some code.
Notably:
– Improvement to Logging
– RPC refactoring as a standalone feature.
– Add RPC methods required by the TB protocol.
– NStratis integration into the solution as a NetStandard project
– Refactor of Full Node Base features
– Bug fixing in the wallet history
– Other general improvements and bug fixes
– Onboarding people from all around the world, some full-time, some part-time, on video chat and in person.
– BreezeNode registration is officially available for testing! Please share with us your experiences and any bugs you may encounter.
Continuous delivery
We now have automated builds and (alpha) releases for the Breeze wallet and for the nuget packages of the Full Node.
Every time the code changes, some robot behind the scenes builds a new version of the wallet for you. Every time.
The Breeze wallet is available in the following operating systems:

  • Windows 7 x86 and x64
  • Windows 10 x86 and x64

The following will be available in the next few days:

  • Ubuntu 14.04 x64
  • OS X 10.11 x64
  • OS X 10.12 x64

You can find these releases at the bottom of https://github.com/stratisproject/Breeze.
The nuget packages can be found here: https://github.com/stratisproject/StratisBitcoinFullNode
Thanks to all of you for helping testing our releases, and we hope you keep doing this. We wish you all a good weekend!

The Week In Stratis (27)

Development progress

We start with a short review of the latest development sprint and the user feedback of Breeze Wallet and the plans ahead. Our core development team has been busy coding and implementing internal processes for the tasks ahead.

  • Currently ongoing our first development sprint (Andreas) (5/07 through 14/07)
  • Implementation of Continuous Delivery, so that users will be able to download the latest version of the wallet, every time the code changes
  • Fixed bugs reported by the community
  • Improved the Breeze wallet’s user experience based of user feedback

There will be a more extensive developer report about our development milestones at the end of the current sprint.

Our Team Keeps Expanding

We have turbo-charged development for Breeze and Tumblebit integrations. We are happy to announce that we have secured a short term commitment with Nicolas Dorier to aid with Breeze’s most pressing issues, such as the full node and Tumblebit integration. His progress will also be included in our regular dev reports going forward.
We are also pleased to announce that we have hired Paul Aderonmu to join our team in the capacity of senior Project and Product Manager. Paul Aderonmu is a 10+ year industry veteran previously employed as a Data Support Analyst / Project Manager. He has extensive record and working experience with financial institutions and processes, having held high-level operative positions with Barclays Global Investors, HSBC Investments and Commerzbank. He will be assisting on laying down the foundations to develop strong corporate Project, Product and Support management processes within the Stratis organization. Paul will be instrumental in the planning process and helping communicate to the community progress in our development and business efforts.

Breeze TumbleBit Readies for Testing

The team is expecting to release the Breeze Full Node this Friday, July 14th, for further testing purposes. This will be purely for testing the blockchain registration on the STRAT main net, and it does not implement the actual tumbler feature yet. The TumbleBit server itself will be first implemented on the Bitcoin testnet and will be made available soon to those that want to test the functionality.

New Tumblebit Team Leader

As we dive deeper into the Tumblebit potential we are strengthening our team to respond to the challenge. As we add more tasks and team members to the project it is important to coordinate the effort to maximize efficiencies. On this regard, we are happy to announce that we have secured the services of expert development team lead Carlton Pringle (Linkedin Profile). He is a senior software development team leader, versed in Agile/Scrum methodologies, as well as Microsoft’s .Net / C# app development processes.

New Tumblebit Developer

We also have the pleasure of announcing the addition of another member to the Breeze / Tumblebit crew – Dan Gould. Dan graduated from Boston University and he is an active researcher and contributor to the Tumblebit / NTumblebit projects. His profile can be seen here. We are furthermore finalizing terms with yet another soon to be announced developer that will be joining the Tumblebit / Breeze project.

Stratis is Azure Certified

Also this week we were pleased to confirm we have successfully concluded Certification of the Stratis Full Node on the Azure Marketplace. This will allow developers to start testing and deploying their blockchain apps with minimum effort and cost.
We are incredibly happy to report that we have received public recognition from Microsoft’s Visual Studio team and we expect to work closely with them in demonstrating how the Stratis Platform seamlessly integrates into the Microsoft suite of products. Expect more news and announcements as we progress actively on that front.

We Are Hiring!

As we have been advertising for the past days, the Stratis team is actively looking for quality developers and business experts to assist us in reaching our goals. We have received lots of interest and look forward to receive CVs from those interested in joining the Stratis team.
Our ideal candidates are C# developers (.Net core) with at least three years experience. Ability to work in Agile (scrum) and fast moving environment, understanding BDD. They have to be passionate about Blockchain and Open Source development. We will require a minimum commitment of 3 months. We will publish more detailed information on specific available positions in the days to come.
Please contact us via the Contact page.
Please check back regularly, as we have more updates on our progress planned.

Alpha Version of Breeze Wallet Released


The Stratis team is releasing today the highly anticipated alpha version of the Breeze Wallet on the BTC testnet. Grab the latest release on our Github.

As announced earlier this year, Breeze Wallet is a proof of concept on the utilization of C# / .Net programming languages into cryptocurrencies, combined with the Stratis Platform capabilities.

The Breeze wallet is the first full SPV Wallet written in C#. This initial version will allow to execute test transactions with Bitcoin (BTC) on the BTC testnet. From this alpha-release the development team expects to gather information about the user experience, and potential issues and bugs in the Breeze Wallet. These would then be addressed before offering a stable, ready for production version.
This marks a solid milestone in our roadmap towards releasing the full capabilities of the Breeze Wallet. Leveraging advancements with Tumblebit technology, the Stratis development team continues to make advances in the integration of advanced features into the Breeze Wallet such as enhanced privacy and scalability capabilities, Proof of Stake, among others.
We would appreciate the participation of our community in helping test and experience this release of the Breeze Wallet, so that we can take your observations into consideration.
Thank you for your support!

Acknowledgements: We want to thank our team members: Wallet developers – Pieterjan Vanhoof (@dev0tion), Jeremy Bokobza (@jeremy) – also our UI designer – Philibert Benoît (@bep42) and developer Dan Gershony (@dangershony), and the rest of the Stratis team for making this release possible today. Special thanks to our community members @Neurosploit, @quantumagia, @molopony, @DogaOztuzun, @detroitpro and all of the others that have helped.
Please report any issues to either the #csharp_development channel on our Discord or on the GitHub repo.

Stratis Node Available on Azure Marketplace


We have great news to share with all of you today. The Microsoft Azure Certification for the Azure Marketplace has been successfully completed. Our Stratis Full Node (for Linux and Windows) has been approved, and the offering is now available publicly.
Initially we are offering deployment of the Interim Node (Wallet v2.0.0.3), which would be updated to the Full Node in C# when that is completed. This is a service geared towards developers that want to experience first hand the basic functionalities of a blockchain full node within the Azure framework. This is a product still under development, and we expect to update it several times during the upcoming weeks. Therefore your feedback and comments will be highly appreciated.

Some useful features of the Stratis Node available for deployment:

  • Synchronise a full Stratis Node in a few minutes instead of hours
  • Test staking capabilities in a secure and redundant environment
  • Run applications (like indexing Stratis Blockchain) on top of the node deployed
  • Combine with other Azure resources (Storage, etc) to increase application performance and reliability

This marks an important step towards consolidating Stratis’ presence in the Microsoft Blockchain ecosystem. This will undoubtedly help solidify different initiatives we are pursuing with the help of various Microsoft teams.
To find the offering, just visit the Azure Marketplace and type ‘Stratis’ in the search bar. Or click on the following link.

Stratis Developer Update – June 2017


The Developer Update for the month of June is a roundup of news, timelines and progress. Addressing the latest topics about Breeze, Tumblebit, Microsoft Azure and Team additions. We hope you find this information helpful and that it provides you with a transparent and clear insight of what to expect in the weeks to come. Enjoy!

Breeze Update

According to plan, the first public Alpha release of Breeze wallet with a final GUI design will see the light of day by the end of June. This is the world’s first Full block SPV Wallet for any cryptocurrency written in C#. It is important to note that, at a later date, the Breeze wallet will the be first C# wallet to support mining via POS – a big leap forward for our technology offerings.
We have encountered unexpected delays in the implementation of Tumblebit that caused us to reshuffle our priorities and reprogram to deliver incremental milestones. We will expand more on this in the Tumblebit Tech Update below, but we want to give you an idea, of what to expect from this point on for the Breeze release schedule:

  1. Full block SPV Wallet with BTC (and STRAT) (around end of June)
  2. Full node Wallet (1-2 weeks)
  3. POS on Testnet (1-2 weeks)
  4. Tumblebit on Breeze + Masternode (min. 4 weeks)

Each stage requires that developers and business units are sufficiently satisfied with testing and audits of this bleeding edge technology, before moving on to the next stage

Breeze Server Masternode Update

Work has been proceeding rapidly on the Breeze Server (masternode). An initial version running on testnet is nearing completion and public release. The Breeze wallet will not include the Breeze Server (masternode) in the initial release scheduled by end of June, as further development and testing is required to guarantee integrity of your funds. The initial release will contain the following items:
– The Breeze Masternode Tumblebit server (completed, leveraging the NTumbleBit project created by Nicolas Dorier).
– The Breeze Masternode secure node advertisement protocol (completed).

Masternode Advertisement Protocol

In order to facilitate a decentralised registry of active masternodes, Breeze servers will utilise the blockchain itself as an immutable public record. On startup, each masternode constructs and broadcasts a specially formatted registration transaction with all the parameters the Breeze wallet clients need to find and connect to them. Some of the example fields featured in advertisement transaction are:
Masternode IP and/or TOR addresses.
A signature proving ownership of the tumbler’s RSA private key.
Proof of liquidity (a signature from a Stratis address containing sufficient funds to run the tumbler). This transaction is only performed once, unless the masternode needs to change its details. The Breeze clients will automatically maintain an internal database of active tumblers, and will update this information when new advertisement transactions are performed.

Masternode testing

The Stratis team will make a testnet masternode available for the community to test the tumbling functionality in the Breeze wallet. More details on this will be made available through public channels in the near future.

Tumblebit Tech Update

The Stratis team is engaging with the authors of the Tumblebit protocol to provide increased security and more efficient tumbling. Ultimately this bleeding edge technology will provide a highly scalable payment channel solution applicable to both the Stratis and Bitcoin blockchains
In the most recent project review with the Stratis team alongside our Tumblebit lead consultant, Nicolas Dorier. We came to the conclusion that some areas require further development and testing, before we can put it in the hands of users comfortably and safely.
We are committed to only deliver tech that meets our strict quality and security standards. This means we will always release cutting edge, fit-and-finish technology. It also means extensive amounts of testing, polishing and optimizing to guarantee that funds are kept secure at all time and processes are properly audited.
With this in mind, we have come to the conclusion that more development, debugging, and testing is required before we can confidently make this technology available to the wider public. A slight reschedule of our TB implementation in the Breeze wallet is thus in order. This has prompted a reshuffle in some of our priorities until we can get some of the key components sufficiently matured and tested. Other releases dependent on Tumblebit , such as Masternodes will also be rescheduled as a result.
We understand that this is of great importance to the Stratis community. So we have taken measures to address and solve these recently discovered challenges with Tumblebit in the shortest timeframe possible:
1. Increasing focus on development processes by implementing common methodologies (Agile, Scrum etc). From now on we expect fortnightly sprint cycles with a development update at the end of each sprint, until final Breeze release.
2. Increased Headcount (Assigning extra tasks and finalizing the appointment of a dedicated TB developer to expedite delivery)
Soon we will be announcing calls for testers to help us with the debug process and evaluating the user experience.
Stratis Cloud Update : Azure Certification
We are happy to report that we have made important advancements in bringing the Stratis Platform Full Node to the Microsoft Azure Certification program. We are currently in the last stages of this process. When the process is concluded we expect to have our full node deployed on the Azure Marketplace. This will enable us to leverage support from the different Microsoft business groups and initiatives around blockchain development. It will also serve to provide the first functional Proof of Concept, showcasing our Stratis Full Node capabilities. Simplifying deployment for developers from around the world. We expect to have this finalized by the end of the current week.

Stratis Academy Update
We have been actively working in designing a strategy to on board developers on the Stratis Platform. In the coming days we will publish a survey to help us identify C#/ .Net talents in our own community and beyond. This will be the start of an awareness campaign among developers, supported also by our ‘Stratis Champions’ program. More details will be shared shortly, but for now please spread the word that we are looking for the best C# talent out there, and make sure to complete the survey if you are a developer.
New Hire:
We are pleased to announce that Benoît Philibert also known as Bep42 (designer of the the Breeze UI ) has joined the Stratis team on a permanent basis. Benoît will support our front end as UX/UI specialist for our apps, and dashboards . You can take a look at his portfolio here. https://dribbble.com/bpdesign
Also, as mentioned above, we are actively looking for C# and .Net developers, preferably with experience in blockchain tech. If you have those abilities please contact us. We are hiring!

Stratis Wallet Update v2.0.0.3


This wallet update was put in place to mitigate against potential delays when syncing fresh wallets. Our network has recently seen a large influx of new wallets which, at times, was putting increased load on the existing nodes. This update introduces a more dynamic load balancing across more nodes to solve long sync times.
There are two main issues people have been experiencing and here’s how to solve both of them:

  1. No connections to the network.
    The solution to this is as easy as updating to the latest wallet version (v2.0.0.3).
  2. Wallet shows it’s synced, but you’re not receiving transactions.
    This is because our main seednode experienced an unintentional DDoS because of the large influx of new wallets causing it to halt. Due to how it was configured a lot of people had that node as their only connection and are now on a wrong chain.

Please follow these steps carefully to fix the issue:

  • Close your wallet
  • Update to v2.0.0.3 of our wallet
  • For Windows: navigate to %appdata%/Stratis using the address bar in Windows Explorer
  • For OS X: navigate to ~/Library/Application Support/Stratis using Finder (Go menu -> Go to Folder)
  • In that folder DO NOT remove the wallet.dat file (you should have this file backed up anyway), as that contains all your funds
  • Remove all the other files in the folder (again, DO NOT remove the wallet.dat)
  • Start your wallet and you should be good to go

This is a good time to take another backup of your wallet.dat file for safe keeping (Not required but backing up your wallet regularly is always recommended )
We strongly advise you to only download from official links provided by Stratis and through official Open Source repository on Github. General information about Stratis wallet can be found here.
Please be extremely careful when installing, operating or otherwise using your wallet. Stratis Group Ltd. is not responsible for any loss or damage to your software in connection to your activities and use of the software.

 

Stratis Developers Roadmap and Update (June 2017)

On this Special Update:

  • Stratis Developers Report
  • First Breeze Wallet Transaction
  • Revised Stratis roadmap

We are happy to report our consistent progress on the development of the Stratis Breeze and related Stratis Platform components. Additionally, we would like to share some highlights from our go to market strategy, to give you an idea of key messages and direction of the Stratis project.
For this special update, we asked our developers to tell first hand what they have been busy with, their accomplishments, present and future challenges.
We start with our Core Tech Developer, Dan Gershony. Besides helping orchestrate the overall development effort at Stratis, Dan is currently focused on finalizing the core nodes infrastructure and POS system.

Under the immense pressure to deliver a lot of complex tech and the shortage of time I feel we are doing well, the C# Fullnode is becoming mature with many of the major components such as the mempool, blockstore and our network builder complete. With POW mining and POS staking as the last barrier, we can soon go into beta and start optimisation and testing cycles. With the FN in beta we can start on the really interesting stuff like sidechains and smart contracts.

Some of the specific tasks that Dan has overseen include:
Fullnode:
Done – Consensus validation of POS
Next – Staking/Mining functionality, currently on collecting transactions from the mempool to add to a block to be mined. POW (mining) is already done next is POS (staking).
BreezeApi:

Done – Creating an HD wallet according to the BIP44 specification and address derivation (coin, account, change, address), Tracking of address balances, retrieving address history, persist wallet to disk, build and broadcast a transaction.
Next – Adding support for the stratis network, test and performance optimisation
BreezeGui:
Done – Most endpoints to call the Breeze api are complete.
Next – Adding both Stratis and Bitcoin tabs (whenever ready) and mainly working on the design.

Breeze Wallet Update

We want to start this Breeze update, with celebrating the great progress we are seeing in our project in terms of functionality and UI.
As we are preparing this note, we are happy to report the First bitcoin testnet transaction from inside Breeze wallet (as you can see in the picture below). Please note this is not yet a tumbled TX, but still very cool and it shows the progress we are achieving on a daily basis.

Jeremy, Dan and Pieterjan have been working hard on making Breeze the best wallet possible. Thanks to their efforts we have already advanced in the development of key functionalities :
Completed:

  • Creating and restoring a wallet.
  • Syncing wallet with the network.
  • Display of history of transactions
  • Calculation of balance for accounts

Ongoing:

  • Building and sending of transactions (Partially completed!)

Outstanding:

  • Encryption of the wallets files
  • Performance and testing review
  • Packaging of the solution.

In the words of Jeremy:

Once the above tasks are done, we still need to do some testing. Hopefully we’ll get lots of help from the community for this bit. Everything is going very smoothly, and between the dev, the UI and design teams, we’re making excellent progress.

  • Pieterjan has been working on the GUI for Breeze wallet. Together with our UI designers they have put together an amazing experience for our Breeze wallet:



The above GUI Breeze Wallet images are just a mockup and some features may not be available by the time of first public alpha release.
Completed

  • Layout (structure) of the wallet
  • Navigation between elements
  • Connection with the backend
  • Create and restore a wallet
  • Show balance, receive address, transactions

Ongoing

  • Error handling
  • Restructure to fit the design mockup

Outstanding

  • Building/sending transactions with the UI
  • Input validation
  • Styling

I’m sure we’ll get a lot of feedback on the GUI and together with the GUI designers we already have a lot of things planned for V2.
Our CEO, Chris Trew, has been busy looking into the different aspects of our roadmap and opportunities around Cloud Stratis and Azure. We have produced an updated version of the roadmap that reflects both our main development activities, as well as go to market activities for the remaining of 2017. The roadmap and corresponding milestone definitions will be posted and made available via our Wiki soon

Cloud Stratis Project and Microsoft Azure:
We are currently working on integrating Microsoft’s Azure into our Cloud Stratis Project, so that we can utilize the infrastructure capabilities of Microsoft’s offering and achieve deeper integration with Microsoft’s business units and partner programs. We are also working on completing Azure Certification for some key components of our platform. In the coming weeks Stratis will hire a developer that will be dedicated to Cloud Stratis development, this person will have extensive experience with the Azure architecture and APIs. The plan is to have a Proof of concept for Stratis Platform deployed on the Azure platform by the end of Q2.
Masternodes:
Breeze Nodes (MasterNodes):
Breeze Nodes will be available for private testing by future node operators soon. Extensive testing on the Bitcoin testnet will be completed in preparation for the production release of the Breeze wallet. We aim to hire a dedicated developer to work solely on TumbleBit and the Stratis Privacy Protocol. We will have separate posts and details about Breeze Nodes as we move closer to release.
Developer Code on Stratis Wiki:
Finally, we want to recommend all developers to visit our Wiki, where we have enabled an area where we plan to share code samples and documentation to help you get started with development on the Stratis platform.

How to Secure Your STRAT


In today’s digital world, we are seeing extremely clever tactics being used to subvert the security systems in place that are supposed to protect us. Hacking and theft are becoming an increasing threat, so what can one do to protect themselves and their digital currencies? With the value of Stratis growing at such a rapid rate, there is high incentive for people to try to steal your Stratis Tokens, so you must use extreme caution when storing them. If you are storing a large number of $STRAT on a device, securing your tokens safely should be your primary concern. While there is no perfect system for securing your $STRAT tokens, there are some steps that you can take to help prevent any malicious attempts to steal your tokens.

  1. A basic rule of thumb for anyone using a computer connected device is to NEVER click on any links in which you are not 100% certain of its authenticity. You do not have to give permission to download malicious software. Any link that you click on in any e-mail or on any website can subject you to unknowingly installing a malicious add-on, program, virus or key-logger into your device. This rule of thumb is important for any device, but it’s absolutely imperative that you follow this rule when you are using any device that stores the private keys to your $STRAT (your wallet). Remember: If you are not sure, don’t click it!
  2. If you are storing a large number of tokens, a valuable solution to avoid theft from your devices is to have a dedicated device (or devices) that are only used for storing or staking Stratis Tokens. That would mean that you do not use the device for any purpose other than initiating transactions, verifying your balance and staking your coins. It is recommended that you factory reset or install a fresh copy of your operating system to this device before installing your wallet. In addition, it is HIGHLY recommended to refrain from installing any third-party software or browsing the internet from this device.
  3. Be absolutely sure that any USB devices that you plug into your device are not infected with malicious software. The best way to ensure this is to completely format your USB stick and only put trusted files in it (after formatting) to transfer to your device.
  4. If you are storing and/or staking your tokens on a Raspberry Pi, please be sure to follow all of the directions from the wallet guide found on the Stratis Platform Wiki. In this guide, you will find instructions on how to setup your firewall and secure the RPI properly. You can find a link to the guide here.
  5. You can split up your tokens across multiple wallets and devices to reduce the risk of a hacker gaining entry to all of your tokens in the same place. Just be sure that all of the devices are secure.
  6. Encrypt all of your wallets, and use very strong passwords to keep them secure. While this will not help if you are infected with a key-logger, it will help protect you against brute-force password cracking techniques. Use a mixture of upper-case and lower-case letters, numbers and characters. Long and difficult passwords are recommended, as they harder to crack.
  7. KEEP YOUR PASSWORD SAFE! Make sure you keep a copy (or copies) of your password in a very secure location. Store it as though all of your tokens depend on it because that is exactly the case. Be very prudent concerning your password because if you lose it, you will lose access to all of your coins, and if your password falls in the wrong hands, they can be stolen.
  8. Hardware failure is very common across all devices, so it’s imperative that you backup your wallets. Store copies of your backups in the same cautious manner as recommended with your passwords. Common practice is to keep your backups on fresh USB sticks stored in safe locations such as fire-proof safes, safety deposit boxes or with someone you trust. As always, use your best judgement. Remember: the password that was set at the time you created that specific backup will be the password you must use in the event you need to restore your wallet. Instructions on how to backup or restore your Stratis Wallet can be found here.
  9. One of the safest ways to store your coins is via “cold-storage.” Hardware wallets have become a popular, trusted and highly secure form of cold-storage. The Ledger Nano S and Ledger Blue are both compatible with Stratis Tokens and they require you to physically press the buttons on your device in order to confirm any outbound transactions from your wallet.

Keeping all of this in mind, please use good judgement and safe practices when dealing with any form of digital currency. It is recommended that you do not store large amounts of Stratis on exchanges, and always use 2FA (two-factor authorization) for any withdraws. While the Stratis team takes the security of the network as an utmost priority, it is up to you to be vigilant in keeping the tokens safe on your devices. Be very deliberate in securing your valuable Stratis Tokens. Thank you for being a part of the Stratis Platform![/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

The Stratis Platform Q&A (Apr 19th)


On the 19th of April, Stratis Group Ltd held an amazing Q&A hosted by Heidi. Stratis was represented by Founder / CEO Chris Trew, Director of Operations Policarpo Guerrero and Stratis Blockchain Developers Dan Gershony and Jeremy Bokobza. The following is an excerpt of the main topics addressed during the conversation. Some texts may have been added for additional information, links and added clarity. We would like to thank Heidi for hosting it and also like to thank the community for sending in all of their questions on Slack and Twitter.
C# Corner Conference
Chris, Dan and Krushang went to New Delhi in India to speak and present Stratis at the C# Corner Conference. Looking back at it, it definitely feels we helped to spread the word on Stratis and the Blockchain to all the developers. The main thing we took away from the conference was building relationships with several people at Microsoft. One of those relationships was with Magnus (Magnus Mårtensson / Twitter: @noopman) , who is a Microsoft MVP of Azure and a regional director at Microsoft. Magnus works closely with the Azure team, so it was brilliant actually speaking with him, catching up, and letting him know exactly what it is we are working on here at Stratis. He seemed very excited by the potential of Stratis. We also made some connections with the Indian Regional Director, and we had some great conversations. Some ideas came up about what we could do together and how we can promote Stratis in India.
Project Breeze / Masternodes
A lot of questions from the community were about Project Breeze and the ‘Masternodes’. We are happy to finally share the requirements to run a master node with all of you. The requirements for a master node are 250,000 STRAT. The 250,000 Stratis requirement for the master node is not something that we put in place. It’s something that is dictated by the technology. Tumblebit works best with a smaller number of servers. It provides privacy through obfuscation. If we have a large number of servers, the technology just will not work, so it’s not something that’s been put in place because we want a whale club or because we want to reward the large holders of Stratis. This is a technical requirement that’s in place. We’ve said we don’t want more than twenty nodes, and by having this minimum amount of 250,000, we hope to never go above above that amount (twenty servers).
There’s going to be several master nodes in the future that provide functionality across the Stratis Platform, and our goal is to have a node tier for every level of holders, so that even people who have a 1,000 Stratis, 10,000 Stratis or 100,000 Stratis can run a node as well.
Bitcoin and Stratis
In the Q&A we were asked if we would consider Stratis potential competition for Bitcoin, or if it is complementary to Bitcoin? We would definitely say that we complement Bitcoin. Our standpoint on it is that every other blockchain technology and start-up out there is in competition, but Bitcoin is not. We want the Stratis blockchain to be seen as somewhat of a test-bed for Bitcoin, so we’re going to be implementing a lot of the improvement proposals being suggested for Bitcoin that haven’t been implemented yet. What we’re hoping for is that the Bitcoin Core guys are going to look at the Stratis blockchain and see we have a reasonably sized market cap, and we’ve implemented this technology, and its working, in production, and say “do we need to think about bringing it over into Bitcoin?,” and visa-versa. We’re going to be bringing over a lot of the features implemented in Bitcoin over to Stratis, so we would definitely say we’re not trying to compete with or replace Bitcoin, but rather, we’re trying to complement it.
Stratis and Ethereum (Smart contracts)
So another question we got and have been asked frequently is what is the difference between Stratis and Ethereum? Well Stratis is built from the Bitcoin blockchain. And also, we plan to offer a slightly different smart contract model from what Ethereum is doing. All of the smart contracts from Ethereum are running on the Ethereum blockchain, but we will probably separate that to where smart contracts will run on sidechains or linked chains only.
That provides various benefits because smart contracts that are run on the sidechains will not bloat the main chain. As far as the difference between Stratis and Ethereum, Ethereum is built around touring-complete smart contracts, and that is their main focus. Stratis is more of a platform, and instead of building our platform around smart contracts, we’re going to be building it around basically all of the main innovations in blockchain technology. We want to be a one-stop-shop. We don’t ever want a company to need to have to go to another provider because we provide everything on the Stratis blockchain. Plus, there is the Stratis Consultancy. We can actually come in, analyze your requirements, go away, create designs, applications, application designs, architectural designs, and work with your in-house developers. You can outsource the whole development to Stratis. So, we are providing that enterprise managed service behind this blockchain solution, and that’s definitely one of our main differences to Ethereum.
There is also a benefit to having C# developers writing their own smart contracts in-house. There’s no barrier of language, or smart contract language, like Solidity. You’re just letting your already existing team of developers build on top of the Stratis Platform.
Regarding to the smart contracts, is that ours are in C#, so that as soon as we deliver these smart contracts in native C#, ten million C# developers around the world will be able to start writing smart contracts. They won’t have that whole learning curve of learning a totally new language. There’s another side to the coin as well. Because it’s in C#, which is a well-known and mature language, there’s millions of developers around the world that can audit the code of the smart contracts and look for any issues; whereas, with a new language, you have that learning curve, so you’re going to have to wait until there’s enough developers that have learned this new language in order to have that audit trail, but we’re going to have it out of the box.
Increase of value of the $STRAT token
The past few weeks the price per $STRAT has significantly risen. We think several factors have caused the increase in value, but the main one is just the realization of what we actually trying to build here. With Stratis, we like to think we overachieved, so the valuation is sort of following the progress of the projects. We are very open and visible in our development. You can come in into any of our development channels, and every time a commit is actually committed to one of our repos, it automatically posts a message in the development channel. People can constantly see the development take place. We are not just an “alt-coin.” We are well beyond that stage. Now, we are building a huge organization behind this project. We’ve got a great team of advisors and consultants advising us in the background, so a lot of what people see, a lot of these good moves we are making, are not just down to Chris or Dan. There is so much input coming into these decisions.

Chris Trew: As far as I’m concerned, we have not seen really anything yet. We are just getting started. We are in first gear.

Sidechains
Any of our assets will probably be deployed on our sidechains. That’s the most likely thing to happen and it’s definitely tradable. One of our main goals is to get the Stratis Platform deployed on some exchanges, and that will definitely prove its capabilities and technology, and show its technology’s strength.
Sidechains come in many flavours. Basically, it’s down to the implementation of the sidechain, what kind of mining algorithm they want to run, and they will have a variety of algorithms to run that we already have implemented in C# available to them, from PoW (all kinds of algorithms), PoS or Hybrid (PoW+PoS), or even what we would call proof of authority, where masternodes will actually be validating blocks on the sidechain, so the sidechain doesn’t need to worry about the security or the mining aspects, and it’s all taken care by the masternodes, and obviously, masternodes can collect fees for that work.
Funding
We expect Stratis to be self-sufficient within the next twelve months, but we’re going be raising ‘Series A’ funding within the next two months, so we are going to have an injection of capital. We’re not worried about funding at all. We didn’t even spend half of our funds, and we delivered on practically all of our promises that we’ve made up until this point, so we are in a very good position, and also we have a huge amount of Stratis available for development, which is actually worth three times as much in comparison to the bitcoin we hold. So, as far as funding is concerned, we are not concerned at all. We’ve got funding to see us through for, probably, the next four years, but we hope that in four years, we’ll be a whole different organisation, a huge multinational,or a conglomerate even, so we’re not concerned about funds at all.
One thing I would like to speak about is at the moment we are defining our pitch-deck that is going to be used for the VC-funding, and for the ‘Series A’ funding, so we will have a pack that will go out to VC firms, and it will have all of the information about Stratis: our business plan, revenue model, budget plans, and all of the information that is required, and we actually made quite a big shift on our focus because it was all built around Stratis as a company and our blockchain as a service (BaaS) offering.
When the guys were giving him the final pitch, for the final approval, he actually stopped them in their tracks and said that we are not talking about one of the exciting things about Stratis, and that is the Stratis Token and the Stratis Blockchain. So, now what happened is that we’ve made a complete shift, and our whole business and consultancy is all built around the token, the benefits of the token, and its quite large market cap that we’ve got surrounding this blockchain, which gives it economic security because of the amount of money actually involved, so I think when people actually see the pitch that is going out to the venture capitalists firms, I think they will be very happy because I know some people have concerns about; ‘Okay so you have Stratis Consultancy, but how does it add value to Stratis as a token?’. Well I can tell everybody now, we’re building the Stratis Consultancy around the Stratis Token.
Cloud Stratis
Originally, the idea for Cloud Stratis was that it would be an orchestration platform, and we will build our own data-centre environment. In our visit to the C# Corner, we spoke with Magnus Martensson, regional director at Microsoft, Azure MVP, probably one of the greatest minds out there around Azure, and Azure Consultancy. We had a great chat with him about our Cloud Stratis platform, about our approach, and I can tell everyone now that we are no longer deploying our own data-centre solution. It’s going to be built on Microsoft Azure. We are currently working with the Microsoft Azure team on that approach and exactly how we can get that there, and for the first time since Stratis was started, we starting to feel real support from Microsoft.
The road ahead
As far as long term vision, we want to cement ourselves as the go-to platform for enterprise organisations. If an enterprise organisation is looking at blockchain technology, we want Stratis to be the first name that comes up, and we do have a long road getting there, but we are definitely in a very good position at this point, and we are building the organisation behind Stratis. We are building a development team, the marketing, promotional strategies and growth hacking strategies behind it. All of this is sort of played in the small amount of success that we´ve seen so far. We´re not even in first gear. We´re really not. No one has seen anything yet. There is so much more to come from the Stratis Project. Once we start delivering our tech, and people can see and feel each aspect, I expect there will be many more happy days for us.
The above is only a ‘small’ part of the total Q&A. So we encourage all of you to watch or read the Q&A. Our community members ‘freeme62410’ and ‘snappaz’ have made a transcript of the Q&A, you can find it on our Wiki. You can also look back the video Q&A.

Chris Trew: My goal is top three market cap. I see anything else as a failure, so the future looks bright.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dZIGSD9NUg

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