September 1, 2017

Breeze Wallet Alpha Release Postponed

We have just got word that the Breeze Wallet Alpha Release had to be postponed due to the fact that the development team has hit several issues running final tests. We apologize for the delay and want to share with you the official statement from the Breeze Wallet team:
As you know we are hard at work on the latest alpha release of Breeze. We are fortunate to be working with some of the leading cryptographers and developers in the crypto-currency space and occasionally their work and reviews surface integration delays and issues such as the one below. Rest assured that this is a normal part of our software development process and is designed to produce a high quality and secure product.
Please bear with us and look out for a new super-secure version of Breeze. Alpha coming soon.

A second bug we are currently addressing:

Thanks for your patience!
The Stratis Team

July 17, 2017

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.

July 14, 2017

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!

July 10, 2017

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.

June 20, 2017

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:

Full block SPV Wallet with BTC (and STRAT) (around end of June)
Full node Wallet (1-2 weeks)
POS on Testnet (1-2 weeks)
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!

June 10, 2017

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:

No connections to the network.
The solution to this is as easy as updating to the latest wallet version (v2.0.0.3).
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.

May 25, 2017

Mission Consensus 2017

We took the opportunity of the gathering of blockchain entrepreneurs, developers and investors at Consensus 2017 to kickstart our funding activities for the BaaS and consultancy areas of our business. It proved to be a very timely decision as the show was pretty much a showcase of existing and upcoming ICOs and many other business opportunities available to us in the market.
As we have mentioned a few days ago, Stratis Group Ltd. has secured the services of renowned blockchain entrepreneur Marshall Swatt, initially in the capacity of Strategic Advisor, to help us evaluate the different options we have been presented and the new opportunities and challenges. His first task – help us evaluate a series of proposals and perform due diligence on some of them with the goal of determining their suitability to our business goals.
Based on his initial assessment, we feel very optimistic about the frameworks and legal support offered by platforms such as Argon Group – recommended to us by Blockchain Capital’s Brock Pierce, read more here and here.
At the same time, we are also performing due diligence on BnkToTheFuture (very attractive in terms of reach and capabilities) as well the traditional VCs that have presented investment offers (such as Seraph.VC and others). With all these opportunities we feel confident that shortly we will be announcing a final selection and officially open our funding round.
On the regulatory side of things, we also had some very interesting meetings with experts and practicing lawyers that will help us sort out present and future legal hurdles we may face. We are following up conversations to secure the services of world class experts, including a former US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) prosecutor, as well as specialists from very prestigious global legal teams in the areas of investment, corporate governance and intellectual property protection. All this, is done with the idea of guaranteeing a solid legal framework that reassures investors and customers of the stability and sustainability of our operation in an environment of rising compliance challenges.
In the next few weeks we will share with the community more details on how things evolve on each of these important areas. Stay tuned!

March 2, 2017

Stratis Core Development Update

Hello Stratis Community!
We are happy to inform that at this point we consider we are well on track to accomplish our goal of having the Stratis Full Node and Stratis Cloud projects finalized by the end of Q1 2017, with the idea of presenting it at the C# Annual Conference in India. We expect to showcase by then a robust solution, with a friendly user interface and have it sufficiently tested by multiple parties before going into commercial production.
To accelerate the process and ensures we meet our final deadline we have added two new members to our development team:
Pieterjan Vanhoof (@dev0tion): Pieterjan has over four years of experience as a Full Stack .NET developer. He got interested in Bitcoin around 2013 and since then he has been captivated by the potential of blockchain technologies. He has specialized in development of wallets for cryptocurrency projects and porting Bitcoin functionalities to other cryptocurrencies.
In the words of Pieterjan:
Opportunities in the cryptocurrency universe come and go – at a fast pace. Technologies must innovate at an exponential rate, companies need to adapt at lightning speed and development teams have to stay ahead of it all. I was given the opportunity to join a team at the forefront of this exciting industry and I’m looking forward to the journey at Stratis.
Jeremy Bokobza (@Jeremy):
Jeremy is a top caliber software developer, with a thorough and extensive knowledge of .NET technologies and architecture as well as C# development. He has been involved for more than 10 years in EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) with Microsoft BizTalk Server, working with Microsoft Consulting Services in the Czech Republic and the U.K. He has also been involved with Bitcoin since 2013 and he will be assisting in the development of Cloud Stratis, the Stratis Full Node and the Stratis Wallet.
According to Jeremy: “Stratis shows great promise in the blockchain world and I’m thrilled to be joining the amazing team they have assembled in London.”
Businesses looking to implement solutions based on blockchain technologies will look for companies like Stratis to go from nothing to full throttle and I want to be part of that. ”
Also, we would like to inform the community that, in our effort to differentiate Stratis, offer the most innovative solutions for enhanced privacy and scalability and add value through a Bitcoin/Stratis symbiosis, we have added to our roadmap the further development and integration of Tumblebit into Stratis. Please expect a full press release following this post.
The integration of Tumblebit brings with it a GUI framework and wallet layer, which allows us to accelerate the development of our C# full node GUI, while incorporating the most innovative technology to enhance privacy and scalability. The full block secure payment validation system also provides us a strong framework upon which we can build our Stratis Sidechain capabilities.
To make this possible, we were required to reshuffle development priorities from our original roadmap, as they will now be contingent to finalizing the full node and full block SPV. Therefore, milestones in the roadmap such as Unity integration, Fiat Gateways, Private chains and Stratis Appliance will be delivered at a date to be determined in Q2. We will provide additional updates once we have concluded development of the key prerequisites.
We count on the Stratis community to stand behind the exciting development path we have chosen, in the understanding that it will undoubtedly increase the value of Stratis as a token, as well as Stratis Group valuation as it begins to incorporate valuable IP and high demand features into its portfolio.
For questions and more details, please join our Slack at: https://stratisinvite.herokuapp.com

January 20, 2017

Update on our Stratis Wallet

We want to thank the community for giving us feedback that have lead to this update. We welcome you all to keep giving feedback so we can keep improving and maintain our high standards.
We have updated our Stratis Wallet to version 2.0.0.2. This update includes our new logo and a better first time connection. We advise you to update your Stratis Wallet to the new version. For new users of the Stratis Wallet we would like you to take a look at our Wallet Instructions before your start. These instructions will guide you through setting up your wallet step by step. Our Stratis Wallet is available for Mac OS and Windows.
Before you update always close your existing wallet if it’s open and then run the new wallet. This wallet will overwrite your existing wallet version. It’s also a nice opportunity to make a new backup of your wallet.dat file in order to keep your wallet safe. We recommend you to backup your wallet on a regular basis.
We’ve noticed that there are still some of you that are using the old 1.2.2 wallet. We urgently ask you to update your Stratis wallet to version 2.0.0.2. People that are running the old wallet are on the old chain. Any stake rewards you received on the old chain after we’ve switched to our new chain will be lost. You will start to receive staking rewards again once you have updated and resynched. It’s essential that you re-synchronize the blockchain after you have updated to version 2.0.0.2. Make sure to make a copy of your wallet.dat file before you begin the process. If you need help with the process please join us on Slack and ask for help in the #support channel.
With the Stratis Wallet you have the possibility to stake your $STRAT. By staking your coins you help to secure the network and in return you get Stratis rewards. The inflation over a year is 1%. A good measure of the amount of rewards you can get is by moving your mouse onto the lightning symbol in your Stratis Wallet.
And last but not least we want to remind you on the following things:

If you aren’t a member of our community on Discord we hereby invite you to join us.
If you still have unclaimed Stratis coins, now is the time to claim them.

Keep your $STRAT safe, secure and stake away :).

January 13, 2017

Update on our Electrum Stratis Wallet

First of all, we want to take this opportunity to thank our Stratis community for testing and providing feedback about our recently released Electrum Stratis Wallet. On this regard we have a few announcements to make:
The Electrum Stratis client has been updated to version 2.7.17. This update includes all changes made to the official Electrum client and also fixes a bug in the Preview and Details tab for transactions. We have made available working versions for Mac OS, Linux and Windows. We advise to keep your seed (12 words) safe at all times and have multiple copies on different locations. Better safe than sorry!
With the Electrum Stratis Wallet you don’t have to download the blockchain anymore to use it. It also has an HD (Hierarchical Deterministic) wallet feature. This means that by remembering 12 words you can get access to your wallet anywhere you want. It will generate your addresses and private keys from those 12 words. So needless to say those 12 words should be 12 words not to forget. The Electrum Stratis Wallet is fast, secure and easy to use. The wallet can be used on the desktop or with the command line interface. It also will support the Ledger Wallet feature after they have released their new firmware.
Something to keep in mind is that you can’t stake with the Electrum Stratis Wallet. However we got your back, with our Stratis Wallet you have the possibility to stake away :).