Stratis Announces Release of the nStratis Development Framework
We are thrilled to announce that today Stratis launches the much anticipated nStratis Development Framework (SDF) – enabling blockchain development in C# and .NET.
SDF marks a major milestone accomplished by the Stratis development team that will allow support for accelerated development of powerful, open source, cross-platform blockchain applications on Microsoft’s .net framework. Following a successful crowdfund earlier this year, Stratis has gone from strength to strength, releasing its Blockchain Development Framework well ahead of an original target date in early 2017.
We are inviting developers to start coding and testing the capabilities of our open source SDF that can be found at: https://github.com/stratisproject/NStratis.
The contributions of Nicolas Dorier to NBitcoin, have been instrumental in bringing the SDF to life and we would like to take a moment to thank him for his tireless work on this. For those of you wishing to start work on the SDF right away we recommend reading this documentation on nBitcoin: [https://programmingblockchain.gitbooks.io/programmingblockchain/content/] It is Bitcoin specific but there are many similarities with Stratis. We are, of course. working on Stratis specific documentation and will get that to you as soon as it is ready for distribution.

‘The work required for the creation of our Stratis #C full node involves two major tasks: a complete rewrite of POS in C# and the refactoring required, also the forking of nBitcoin to support the Stratis blockchain and its many diversions from Bitcoin. Today we are proud to announce that we have completed the latter, thanks to the invaluable dedication of our top developers Nicolas Dorier and Dan Gershony, whose technical expertise has made this possible well before the Dec-Jan goals set in our road map” Chris Trew, Stratis CEO.

Our initial release provides a blockchain development toolkit for developers, such as an API and a TransactionBuilder that supports all the standard transactions, such as record keeping on the Stratis blockchain, timestamping and proof of existence.
List of Features
Full script evaluation and parsing
A RPC Client
A Rest Client
The parsing of standard scripts and creation of custom ones
The serialization of blocks, transactions and script
The signing and verification with private keys (with support for compact signatures) for proving ownership
Mnemonic code for generating deterministic keys (BIP 39), credits to Thasshiznets
Hierarchical Deterministic Wallets (BIP 32)
Payment Protocol (BIP 70)
Payment URLs (BIP 21,BIP 72)
Two-Factor keys (BIP 38)
We hope you will enjoy exploring the code and building your first apps.

Announcing Stratis Academy and Upcoming Hackathon
This launch also serves as an opportunity to introduce the Stratis Developer Academy. This will be a permanent program aimed at nurturing and growing the Stratis developer community. We plan to offer a range of educational and promotional services such as training webinars, mentorship and certifications as well as competitions and events. As an inaugural event we will be holding the first Stratis Hackathon for developers in the upcoming weeks. Stay tuned to our next Stratis weekly for details.
We hope you will enjoy exploring the code and will surprise us with novel ideas and applications on top of the nStratis Development Framework (SDF).

Over the weekend we faced an issue with the staking features of $STRAT. We have worked diligently and taken precautionary measures to protect the network and investors. We have localized and corrected a code misconfiguration that caused the issue and have distributed the required updates through the Stratis ecosystem. We want to thank you for your understanding of the situation, and assure you no funds have been compromised and that our network is as stable as ever.
What should users do?
Update your wallet to v2.0.0.1
This new wallet version (2.0.0.1) corrects code issues on the staking functionality of Stratis.

• Download the new wallet https://github.com/stratisproject/stratisX/releases
• Close your existing wallet if it’s open.
• Run the new wallet.

This wallet will overwrite your existing wallet version.
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.
What should exchanges, wallet services, etc. do?
By now you should have received an update notice from our team. If you haven’t please contact us via our Slack channel.
Thanks for Your Support!
We want to thank you for your understanding and support during these demanding times. We are learning from these experiences how to improve our processes and our products, so that potential incidents are always minimized.

Greetings and welcome to our fourth edition of the Stratis weekly newsletter.
This week we have responded to a slack conversation in which some of our community members were discussing how to help with Twitter promotion. In response we have come up with a smart little infographic that we hoped would give you insight into some of our stats, whilst being something you can share within your social networks. That’s not all though – we are pleased to report that two of our core team members went along to the Blockchain Money Conference in London at the weekend – scroll down to read their highlights from the event.
 

Notes from the Blockchain Money Conference
Stratis were out and about at the Blockchain Money conference in London on Sunday 6th and Monday 7th November. The conference was held at Bishopsgate and Stratis Dev Dan Gershony was joined by PR and content manager Freya Stevens. The program included the likes of John McAfee, Roger Ver (Blockchain Ultimate) and Nic Cary (Blockchain.info)
Freya
The conference kicked off with Marieke Flament, Managing Director of Circle, describing internet has fundamentally changed many industries since it’s inception such as the travel and music industries, but for some reason banking still resists. The Bitcoin and Banking panel went into more detail about where the utility of blockchain technology could be within the finance industry but couldn’t agree on the extent of its potential. Professor Ferdinando Ametrano was of the opinion that blockchain was just another hype word and explained that smart contracts were not needed where nano-second trading was already taking place. ‘We don’t need the DAO – we have people’ he declared, and the subtleties of trade finance would not be solved with blockchain. Instead he argued for applied cryptography or ‘a database on steroids’.

Anthony Macey (Barclays) strongly disagreed arguing that blockchain technology had enabled him to reduce settlement flows down from 14 days to under 4 hours which represented a seismic shift for the industry. Chris Ballinger (Toyota) also took sides adding that at the moment ‘It’s probably faster to mail bills than to use the current attempts to digitise financial settlements’. He then returned the discussion back to where he saw the opportunity of blockchain technologies.

‘Cryptocurrencies turn every instrument into a ‘bearer’ instrument – whether financial, physical or intellectual property – all can become bearer instruments thus solving the trust problem – that is the real value in the system’

Dan
For me John McAfee’s talk was really interesting. He spoke about the spread of keylogger software used to spy on wallet keys during signup. He talked about the need to use harware wallets and of his conviction that there will never be a software wallet that is secure so long as mobile exists. Outside in the foyer I chatted to Paul Puey, CEO of Airbitz wallet who said they were working on delivering edge encryption to everything on their platform which is definitely a way forward!
Something else John McAfee said was intriguing – he has set up a mining business in the US on his conviction that ‘cryptocurrencies are here to stay for good or for bad, nothing can top that now, not even governments’. This sentiment was echoed by political representatives on the European Government and Blockchain panel. EU parliament member Eva Kaili said that there would be voting on a new raft of regulation within the next few months but since the technology is still in a state of development they will be cautious to take any tough measures, and they will certainly not be classing cryptocurrencies as money any time soon. Overall the message I got from the political establishment is one of gradual acceptance.
I also noticed the theme that blockchain is being applied to other use cases beyond finance. Michael Mainelli from Y/Zen took a quick tour of its use in Geostamping, Clinical Trials and Supply Chains – anywhere that a central 3rd party situation can be found. Blockchain he said, has the potential to reduce natural monopolies thereby reducing a raft of vulnerabilities like switching costs and sloth. All in all though, it’s exciting times for blockchain.
That’s all for now but look out for next weeks issue where we will dive into the C#.NET protocol.
Wishing you a super week!

LONDON, U.K. October 27th 2016 – Provisioning of Stratis blockchain nodes is now available on the Microsoft Azure platform.
The Stratis platform, combined with Azure, will allow corporations to rapidly deploy blockchain nodes to support their decentralized applications. The Stratis Platform is an end-to-end solution to develop, test and deploy blockchain-based applications for the Microsoft .Net framework, utilizing the Stratis platform capabilities on top of Microsoft Azure and Microsoft’s development environment. It is designed for the needs of real-world financial services and other organizations that want to access the benefits of Blockchain technologies.
As an initial step Stratis has deployed a template to run a Stratis Blockchain Node on Ubuntu VM. The template code allows one-click access to developers so that they can quickly have full nodes spun up for building, testing and extending the services and capabilities of Stratis. This service also allows stakers the possibility to have their coins ‘online’ and in a dedicated staking node, to protect from malware and viruses.

We see this as first step towards a deeper integration and partnership with Microsoft in the BaaS arena. Being a company that specifically develops tools for the Microsoft ecosystem, it’s only natural that we integrate as tightly as possible with their platform offerings. This undoubtedly will provide greater visibility for our projects and serve to showcase the multiple functionalities that Stratis Platform can offer.
Chris Trew, CEO, Stratis

Details on the deployed templates on Microsoft’s Baas Platform can be found at: https://github.com/Azure/azure-quickstart-templates/blob/master/blockchain/details/stratis.md

Stratis offers a turnkey solution that enables developers and businesses to develop, test and deploy blockchain-based applications quickly and easily without the costs and security concerns that would otherwise arise from an in-house implementation.
For more information visit: stratisplatform.com.