Answer questions that were collected from the Stratis community via the Stratis slack channel and Twitter accounts. They will be addressing Breeze, masternodes, sidechains, smart contracts and general questions.
Okay, I believe we are live. So, yeah, should we wait, maybe see if someone can comment and see if we are getting live? It's not live. That's caring.
There we go. Okay. Yeah, that's all. Now we're live.
Now we're live. Okay. Okay. Okay.
Okay. So, hello, Stratus community and all of our viewers. We are here today with Chris True, the CEO, Dan Gershney, the CTO, Philicarpo, sorry, Policarpo, Guerrero, and Jeremy Bocobza. Yeah, hello everyone.
Hello. We are going to address some general info about Stratus. We will talk about masternodes and side chains and smart contracts. These are questions that have been fielded by the Stratus community on the Slack channel and on Twitter accounts.
Now they have been edited for clarity and for some personal commentary. That's why we are not mentioning the author or by name of the Twitter handle. So, we would like to start to talk about the most recent trip to India and what happened at the conference in New Delhi. Yeah, so we recently went out to Delhi and India to speak and present at the C sharp corner conference.
It was an amazing experience going to Delhi for everybody. It was our first time in India and it really was an amazing place. Yeah, we gave the presentation and we definitely feel that we helped spread the word on Stratus and exactly what it is we're trying to build. The main takeaway from the C sharp conference was us building relationships with several people at Microsoft.
So, one of those was Magnus who's the MVP of Azure and was closely with the Azure team. So, it was brilliant actually speaking with him and catching up and just letting him know exactly what is that we're working on a Stratus and he seemed very excited by that. The potential of Stratus. We also made some connections with the R.D.
Regional Director at the Indian Regional Director. And we had some great conversations and some ideas came up about what we could do together or how we could promote Stratus in India. Okay. So, are we ready for the first round of questions?
So, this will be under the topic of master nodes. The first question I have is can you talk about the breeze node requirements, for example, the 250,000 Stratus requirement? Yeah, so this has been discussed a great length internally amongst the team and also the community. The 250,000 Stratus requirement for the master node is not something that we've put in place is dictated by the technology.
The idea that some of it works is it works best with a smaller number of servers. So, 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 we've put in place because we want to build a whale club or we want to reward the large holders of Stratus.
This is a technical requirement that's in place. I mean, we've said that we don't want more than 20 nodes. And by having this minimum amount, we hope to never go above that amount. But there's going to be several master nodes that provide functionality across the Stratus platform.
And our goal is to have a node tier for every level of holders. So, even guys that have only got 1,000 Strat, guys that have 10,000 Stratus, 100,000 Stratus, we're going to have tiers for everybody. So, it's not like, OK, you don't have 250,000. You can't run a node.
You will be able to run a node in future. We're also going to be rolling out functionality that incentivizes users to run nodes. So, users that don't even hold any Stratus just to operate a full node to help secure the network. And that's the reason why we have the 250,000 requirement.
OK. How many tumble bit servers or master nodes do you think will be required? How do you get to that number? Will it be a fixed amount or will it increase if numbers of transactions increase?
So, in the early stages, we will have a fixed number. But as the transaction volume processed by the breeze nodes increases, then we may increase the number of nodes in future. But ideally, what we want is we want people to scale up their nodes. So, instead of adding additional nodes, they will just add more CPU power or memory power to their nodes.
So, they can process a higher number of transactions. So, we'd still be keeping them with the minimum amount of nodes. But we'd be able to process more transactions. And that would obviously mean more fees to the node operator.
OK. Please explain in a little more detail the other nodes that will be available in the future. Payment node, assigned chain node, identity node, what is their use case, and why is it needed as a master node? Any requirements?
I mean, to go into low level details about each type of node is well beyond the scope of this Q&A. But if Dan speaks about the side chain nodes, it may give everybody a better understanding of why they're actually required. Yeah. Well, the plan for master nodes is that master nodes will be able to line transactions blocks on a side chain.
And then they will collect fees for that process, for that work. So, that will give them some way to make money and also provide security on side chains in the process. Then the side chains doesn't have to care about mining or verifying blocks. They get the security of the strategy's blockchain or of what the master nodes can provide.
So, generally for side chains in the plan, yeah. And master nodes. Okay. If, for example, you have one million stratus, do you have to run four master nodes in a separate setup, or can you do one big master node with the whole one million?
Is running four small master nodes more profitable than one big master node? No, we're going to be recommending that everybody, as I said earlier, one scales up their nodes. So, instead of adding additional nodes, you would add more CPU power, more memory power to your single node. And that would allow you to process a higher transaction volume.
Also, from a technological perspective, it would be probably easier to run four different nodes if you had that amount of money. We would have to change the platform a bit more to support more strats per master nodes. So, it might come in the future, I guess, but it's not on the plan at the moment. Will breeze nodes be able to choose their own fee, or is 1% the floor?
Can we get below? Yeah, so breeze node operators will be able to set their own fee? Some companies may want to tumble to hide certain transactions. They don't care about anonymity.
They just want that transaction to be out for everyone to be able to see. They want to do it in a legal manner with KYC. Will the community master nodes be able to do that and how? Or will stratus corporations set up their own master nodes specifically for companies to do it in a legal manner?
So, there's two service offerings that we'll be providing as a business aside from the breeze node networks. So, we'll be providing a consumer targeted privacy solution for people that are not necessarily doing anything illegal, but they want privacy. So, they don't want all of their transactions to be made available to all. So, we'll be providing them privacy.
But in order for us to provide that, they will have to know your customer type regulations. And then the other side of the coin is our business targeted privacy solution. So, one of the things that we're working towards is providing compliant blockchain solutions. So, blockchain solutions are regulatory compliant for the financial services industry.
And the first step to regulatory compliance is privacy. All financial data on the blockchain must remain private. So, this was one of the reasons that we actually decided to move forward with the breeze project because we're not just going to be left with the breeze wallet at the end of this. We're going to be left with the breeze wallet, the GUI, the full stack, and also this privacy protocol that we're then going to apply to various different use cases across the stratus platform.
Now, the consumer targeted platform will be operated by the breeze nodes, but the business orientated platform will be supported by nodes that we actually run ourselves. And that's for various different reasons around privacy, et cetera. And also, we're going to have to run pretty large servers that are going to have quite huge overheads in order for us to process the kind of transaction volume that we expect to see. Hopefully, that answers the question.
Now, do the IPs need to be known by the system or do the master nodes simply read the blockchain without revealing themselves? Yeah, so the IPs are not known. The system, so the breeze client will actually look at the blockchain. We're not sharing too many low level details at this point, but the breeze client will look at the blockchain and it will actually guess list of tumble bit servers from the blockchain.
So, we won't be hard coding any IPs, hard coding any DNS addresses in the breeze wallet, it will all come from the blockchain. But this centralized lookup, yeah, if you will. And also, this concept isn't one that I created. This actually came from Ethan, the creator of tumble bit.
And if you look at the white paper very, very closely, you will actually see this approach documented. And it's something that still needs to be developed on and tumble bit the official implementation. So, we're hoping that once we've developed this solution, we can then port it over to and tumble bit, which is the official implementation of tumble bit. So, there is a high incentive for people to fork the breeze wallet due to the big cost of start a master node.
They could then also offer lower fees in an effort to compete for the customers from breeze wallet. What are your thoughts on the scenario playing out? Yeah, it's a very good point and it's something that's been raised with myself in private. So, we're not locking down the breeze client to this breeze network of nodes.
So, inside the breeze client, you'll be able to configure your tumble bit server. So, we're not locking the breeze client down to any specific network. So, what that does is it creates a situation where somebody doesn't actually have the fork breeze to using with a different tumble bit server. And we're all about decentralization, so we don't want to lock anybody down.
We don't want to force people to use this breeze network of nodes, but we would expect them to, because using a single tumble bit server doesn't provide any redundancy at all. And then you've got factors like liquidity. Our breeze network of nodes are going to have a large reserve of bitcoins in place that allows us to process that transaction volume of Bitcoin Tumbles. It would be very hard for another service to stand up and network like ours.
But we won't be locking it down at all. And if somebody wants to go and fork the breeze wallet and innovate on top of it, then we will support that. Yeah, we'll welcome them, definitely welcome them. But I thought I don't think that's an issue.
We don't worry so much about other people forking them. Yeah, but I think that question actually had two points. So, you've got the breeze side of it. But then you've got the stratus side of it.
And I get this question a lot. What's stopping a company from, from cloning our open source code and creating their own stratus blockchain? So we're not stopping anybody from doing that. And once again, if somebody's going to innovate on top of our code base, then nine times out of ten, we will support them.
But if a business clones our code base and implements their own internal blockchain, it doesn't have any of the benefits of blockchain technology. So it's not trustless, it's not decentralized. And that is one of the main benefits of the stratus platform is that we're taking blockchain technology and presenting it for the enterprise, but we keep in the main benefits of blockchain technology, which is trustless and decentralization. So if somebody, if a business was to clone our code base and implement their own internal blockchain, that would be no different than a traditional centralized database.
And nine times out of ten in that scenario, ours as a business would recommend that they go with a traditional centralized database. If that's what they want into achieve. How will the master notes be selected in the breeze wallet? Will it be a hard-coded IP list or will they somehow be looked up automatically by the network?
If a new whale joins six months later with a master node, will that node be included in breeze wallet automatically? It will correct, yeah. So when somebody operates a breeze load, it basically creates a transaction on the stratus blockchain to a specific address that the breeze wallet is constantly looking at this address to see for new transactions. And in that transaction that they send, they'll actually specify their IP and host name and also their RSA public key.
So if a new node comes online, when it first comes up during that initial configuration, it will write that transaction. So the next time the person opens up the breeze wallet, it will see that next transaction at that time with that breeze load to their list of breeze loads. Why is the breeze tumble bit implementation getting so much hype if this service already exists? Well, the service doesn't actually exist.
I mean, we have traditional centralized tumblers currently in use, but the main innovation that tumble bit brought was it allows people to use these tumblers in a completely trustless manner. So with a traditional tumbler, you're not only trusting the tumbler with your clients, but you're also trusting them with your anonymity, that tumbler can de-anonymize all transactions. Nine times out of ten, that tumbler can de-anonymize all of those transactions is processing, whereas with tumble bit, it's completely trustless. You're not trusting others as a business, you're not trusting the node operator.
You only have to trust the cryptography that backs the system somewhat like the blockchain. I think we're also going to be the first ones to provide like a production ready tumbler server. The tumbler bit is, and the working progress is in implementation, but the breeze wallet will take it to production levels. So is it true breeze wallet will also help Bitcoin scalability issue, and will it use a system that will allow extremely quick sync?
Could you elaborate more on that? So in the tumble bit white paper, it does talk about some of the scalability benefits it brings, but as far as we're concerned, they're just not mature enough now, so we're not promoting tumble bit as a scalability solution. But we will in future most definitely be working towards deploying it as a scalability solution. And I think the quick sync is, I mean, I think the question means the full block SVV, so using a full block SVV to query the Bitcoin database.
So I think that's what the question. Yeah, not only are we going to deploy a technology for the scalability limitations, but we're also going to be deploying technology to speed up the sync, the initial sync. Although it's not an issue currently in the stratus blockchain, it will be one day, like it is with Bitcoin, it will be one day. So before we actually get to that stage, we're going to be implementing various features to speed up that initial sync.
With all our plans for strategy, it definitely will grow one day, yeah, most definitely. Now, I have a question myself, I was wondering, would you consider stratus potential competition for Bitcoin, or is it complimentary to Bitcoin? Basically, is it just like an extension for Bitcoin, or could it replace Bitcoin one day? I'll definitely say that we compliment Bitcoin.
So my standpoint on it is that every other blockchain technology and startup out there is the competition, but Bitcoin is not. We want the stratus blockchain to be seen as somewhat of a testbed for Bitcoin. So we're going to be implementing a lot of the improvement proposals that have been suggested for Bitcoin, but haven't yet been implemented. So what I hope is that the Bitcoin core guys are going to look at the stratus blockchain and say we have a reasonably sized market cap, and we've implemented this technology, and it's working in production.
Do we need to think about bringing it over to Bitcoin, and vice versa, we're going to be bringing over a lot of the features implemented in Bitcoin over to stratus. I would definitely say that we're not trying to compete or replace with Bitcoin, we're trying to complement it. We're going to be side by side with Bitcoin core, the Bitcoin guys, all the innovations that come from Bitcoin, which we very much appreciate. We're bringing everything to our platform, testing it as well.
Yeah, and one of the upper main benefits of the stratus platform is people are very concerned when it comes to all the problems of the Bitcoin client. So you have Bitcoin unlimited and a few other different implementations. Now one of the concerns that people raises, none of those projects have the team or the production in place of Bitcoin core. Every change that goes into Bitcoin has hundreds and hundreds of some of the best minds out there in cryptography and blockchain, actually doing code reviews of those changes.
I'm not sure that any of our alternate implementation can actually claim the same. We one day want to get to that place where we have hundreds of developers looking at our code, reviewing our code auditing it before we actually implement any changes. So if we do get to that goal, then we really will be adding value to Bitcoin because we're basically doubling the size of the organization behind Bitcoin. And we support Bitcoin core.
I mean, we haven't come out publicly and said we support Bitcoin core over Bitcoin unlimited, but I come from a place where if something's not broke, you don't fix it. Bitcoin core guys have been doing a great job. You are conservative on making changes, but understandably so there's so much money involved with the Bitcoin blockchain that they have to be 110% sure that any changes they implement are not going to break anything. So we want to add to that whole development process and have a whole other side of it.
And there's a lot of open source focus developers involved with Bitcoin core, but what we want to bring is we want to bring that corporate development element to our development and to Bitcoin development. So it was a very limited answer. So would you like to go on to more general questions about stratus to token or would you like to talk more maybe about cloud stratus versus azure. Should we go with the general questions first.
Okay, so what were you thinking about at the time when you were doing what you were doing when you had the idea for stratus, that kind of thing more personal. What was your situation and feelings before and after you realized you can build this project? That's a very good question. I can't remember exactly what I was doing at the time I come up with the idea, but I was working in a financial institution in the UK in a technical architecture role predominantly around virtualization.
And during this time I was working on blockchain technology and also home and home and my skills on C sharp and as part of my work as working as a technical architect, I was very much exposed to corporate development enterprise IT and I could just see that we had this huge gap in the marketplace that there was no tools or platform for C sharp developers who make up a huge share of the corporate development space. So that was the reason behind the sort of why I decided to push forward with the project, but I mean, I didn't really realize how big it could be until probably a few months after the ICO when we started to really build some traction. Yeah, things again brilliantly and I'm really happy that I did decide to proceed with the project and I'm sure there's a lot of guys out there that are happy that as well. Yeah, we all have been so I worked on Coinport before and so it's a cryptocurrency wallet and when I had a chat with Chris and I immediately found the vision of stratus and I really liked it and I decided to commit and come over and start developing the full of like building a Bitcoin blockchain in C sharp is very much a dream of every.
C sharp developer was involved in the big community lately and yeah bringing it to the community, bringing the platform to the community is something I really enjoy doing so it's not only work, it's also like a dream come true kind of. Yeah, most definitely I mean there's various there's various reasons for our success up until now, but one of them is definitely a team that we have working on stratus. I mean everybody that works on stratus has taken a pay card their day rate that's from the CEO all the way down to the marketing guys nobody's getting paid anywhere near what they used to get paid so that right there shows a commitment of the team that everybody's doing this because it's something that they love this isn't just a job for any of us. We all love we do our work through the night most nights I probably have between four four or five hours every day, but that's that's just because I love what I do.
Late night commits and our slack community is just awesome it's great it's it's fun to go there and chat to people most definitely. And our team is very committed and motivated and Chris did a good job in building a good team I think. Thank you. How about anyone else in this chat follow Carpo or Jeremy would you like to chime in on your thoughts of when you first started getting into the stratus platform.
I came into this by accident I've been looking for always for a platform a coin that has a platform behind and I got in very different projects. It's back coin safe to coin then with the open bazaar so after those I didn't really find something that was as interesting as a stratus was to me in the whole course of the. All the possibilities doing this cost at this moment. So I think that was my major motivation seeing that there is it's much more than just a coin that we have a lot of things that we can develop around that there is a huge.
Developer community that we can address and have them create an application for us. And then your services and being into the to their workplaces to their companies and it does the best show showcase we can. So yeah and then of course we're meeting Chris and the and the great thing is as we can. And then the connections he has with any corners and the community.
The guys have a huge support and loyal friends and workers that are now joining the company as part of the team. So I mean all of that I think besides the obvious financial reasons I will say. It makes me very very excited. It feels very good to commit code and get the community to you know like it or give good feedback.
I mean as a developer it feels very good really. Overall all the validation we have received also from Microsoft and from experts. We have a lot of consultants that work with us and all of them say this is a great idea and they see the value I mean. A few people really have something to say about our ability.
Or can point at obvious weak points. I think we're in a very good position to become the next speaker. So let me tell you where I came from. So I can on this project we've done actually at the beginning because then and I have been working together for about 10 years.
And you know working at Microsoft working on C sharp for all these years. And that's been working me with Bitcoin forever. And then the last six months he said you know I joined this company. He said great this and that and I never really said okay maybe it's interesting.
And then at some point I said okay you know I'm going to have a look at what it's like. And then I came on Slack and I saw the community and also what the team wanted to build. And it's in C sharp and it's kind of close to my to my my heart. And then I finally joined them and when you see the people I'm working with.
Police a bit far away but always watching what we're doing. And you see the community that's behind that because you know usually you when you come onto a project you build something and you don't know. If people like it if they don't like it you cannot build and you hope for the best. Right here you have instant feedback from people.
You know and they are pushing you and also the fact that everything that we do is open source. Like it's you know you have to go to the end. You have to finish it you have to write the best code you can. It has to be solid.
It has to make sense. And this is a kind of project that I like. So I'm really happy to be here as well. And you know we're in this for the long run.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, most definitely. So that's my that's my story. Thanks Jerry.
Cheers. Those are great. Thank you for sharing that. That was amazing.
So. What does stratus have that Bitcoin doesn't have? I find the answer difficult because stratus platform products seem to support both of them equally well. Like with the breeze wallet.
So what are the drivers of demand for the stratus currency as opposed to Bitcoin? So I think Chris already answered kind of this question earlier. But like we don't see ourselves as a competing implementation to Bitcoin. And that's not our plan.
We want to go side by side and we want to develop a platform for the social community. A blockchain platform for the social community. And we welcome on innovation that come from the Bitcoin core team. We bring over everything they do.
All the white papers, all the code that they develop. And we hope to contribute as well. Yeah, but as far as. Because although we don't see Bitcoin as a competitor, we will have several significant advantages over them.
The first one being our tumble bit implementation. So. Tumble bit is a very complex concept. And one of the reasons for that complexity is so it can support Bitcoin without any soft or hard forks.
So tumble bit works with the Bitcoin protocol as it stands today. And that introduces a lot of complexity into the concept. Well, because we can make changes to our blockchain, we're able to strip back a lot of that complexity. So we reduce the network bandwidth that's got to be sent between the tumble bit client and the tumble bit server.
We also reduce the computation time. So a lot of people don't actually understand how tumble bit works. It's a very complex system, but it uses RSA puzzles to do these off-chain transactions. And that obviously requires a lot of CPU cycles.
So just for instance, if you were to process 1000 tumble bit transactions on a standard consumer grade CPU, that could take up to 10 minutes. Whereas if we can reduce the computation time by half, that then reduces down to five minutes. And we're looking at reducing that by up to 70 or 80 percent. And the other byproduct of that is it allows us to provide a protocol level anonymity that would then be comparable to the likes of Dash and Manero and those guys.
So that's definitely going to be one advantage that we'll have on the tumble bit sign over Bitcoin. But then our site chain implementation as well, we're going to be making changes to the stratus main chain to support some additional functionality on sites. It will not be available on Bitcoin. And I'm sure that eventually we'll have many features that are not available on Bitcoin, but we hope that Bitcoin will start to pull them back from stratus into the Bitcoin code base.
What is the difference between stratus and Ethereum? The stratus is based on the Bitcoin blockchain kind of. And also we plan to offer a slightly different smart contract model to what Ethereum are doing. So all the smart contracts on Ethereum are running all the Ethereum blockchain.
And we will probably separate that a bit like smart contracts will run on the site chains or linked chains or something. And that provides various benefits because smart contracts running on the side chain will not blow the main chain. If there was any sort of security risk, really we should have some isolation between the main chain and the side chain. And it just seems like a better approach to us, but as far as what are the differences between stratus and Ethereum.
Ethereum is built around touring complete smart contracts and that is their main focus. And they're doing a very good job here. Don't give it wrong, but stratus is more of a platform. So instead of just building our platform around smart contracts, we're going to be building our platform around basically all of the main innovations in blockchain technology.
So we want to be a one-stop shop. We don't ever want a company to have to go to another blockchain provider because we provide everything common stratus blockchain. And then there's also stratus consultancy. So I know in the last couple of months, it may have changed the situation with Ethereum and then having a consultancy business behind it, but we can provide end to end consultancy.
So we don't just provide you the platform, you have to go off, develop your app. We can actually come in, analyze your requirement, go away, create designs, application designs, architecture designs, work with your in-house developers, or you can outsource the whole development to us. So we're providing that enterprise managed service behind this blockchain solution. And that's definitely one of our main differences.
There is a benefit for having C-shop developers writing their own smart contracts in-house. There's no barrier of language like learning a new language, smart contract language like solidity, or just letting your already existing team of developers build on top of the stratus platform. So as far as we're concerned, one of the main advantages of our smart contracts as opposed to what Ethereum offer is that ours are in C-shop. So as soon as we deliver these smart contracts in native C-shop, 10 million plus developers around the world will be able to start writing smart contracts there.
And then they won't have that whole learning curve of learning the totally new language. And there's another side to the coin as well because it's in C-shop, which is a well-known mature language. There's thousands of developers, millions of developers around the world that can audit the code of a smart contract 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 whole audio trail, but we're going to have that out of the box.
What can stratus do for my company? Should we fork stratus and create our own token or shall we just use stratus? I mean, everybody's welcome to clone stratus and create their own internal blockchain, but as far as I'm concerned, that's no different to a traditional centralized database. If they want the true benefits of blockchain technology, which are that it's trustless and that it's decentralized, then they'll come to us.
So we will probably only give our support or technical support to change that our sidechains to most definitely. Obviously, you can go to the wild and do it yourself, but we will only help people who come to us to our token, to our technology capabilities and want to work with us. Yeah. So we'll smart track, we'll smart contracts only work on a side chain.
Probably, yes, we don't want to pollute the stratus main blockchain with contract data. So ideally, the approach will be that you build your own side chain or linked smart contract chain, and then all your smart contract data is stored separately. You still get the validation capabilities of the stratus blockchain, but your data doesn't bulk up the main blockchain. And yeah.
Okay. While C sharp is a big advantage, there are still a lot of other languages out there. Will you be providing libraries in Java, Go, PHP, et cetera, to communicate with stratus? Most definitely.
Yeah. I mean, our platform is built around C sharp, but we don't want to alienate the platform with the C sharp community. So yeah, we will be releasing libraries for various different other languages. SDKs.
And also we will be compliant, fully compliant with the Bitcoin RPC model. So any existing libraries will be able to communicate with our technology. Exactly. And also any other integrations of digital currencies, it should be very simple for them to switch over to the stratus for node, whether that's the Bitcoin or the stratus version, because we support the legacy Bitcoin RPC.
So it won't require extensive redevelopment of their code. Regarding the C sharp corner announcement, question number one, my assumption is that the object using the object used to reward users is its own coin. If that's the case, are there plans to make this coin available on exchanges to be traded? And question two, how does stratus plan to integrate a reward system that has monetary value to what appears to be a free platform?
I'll take one. The coin will definitely be a one-time sidechain. So one time one of paying towards the sidechain, and it will definitely be traded on exchanges, that's the plan. Regarding how will be monetary, the coin, I think this by being on an exchange, it gives the coin value.
And this is how the value of the how it would be money, you'll be able to get value on to the to the coin. I guess that's the question. How does mobile fit into your strategy? Will we see an official mobile wallet anytime soon?
We will, yeah. So mobile is central to a lot of our plans. There's a huge user base of mobile users out there, and it's definitely something that we're going to be targeting. We have been doing some work on our full block SPV, and potentially we may be able to deploy that on mobile devices in future.
But at this moment in time, it's going to be predominantly wallet. And I do have plans also to migrate at some point, going forward to run on mobile devices, and strategies would be one of the main tokens on the coin. So how are you going to solve the problem if the token reaches a high price? How are you going to tackle that problem that customer aid buys a package from Stratus with required tokens, included with a hypothetical value of one US dollar.
For example, in customer X, six months later, also wants to make use of your services. However, the price went up 10 fold. Will that increase the package price for customer X, or does the team compensate the price increase out of their own pocket? Well, we're not going to be compensating anyone over our pockets.
That's for sure. So what we're going to do is it's a very valid point, and it's been raised by some of the smartest guys in our community. And what we're going to do is we're going to have tiered subscriptions. And another approach that we're going to have as well is if Stratus sees a huge increase in the value, we may have to look at the transaction fee.
So the base fix transaction fee. So in future, we may actually have to reduce that transaction fee in order to keep that sort of steady cost of transaction on the Stratus blockchain, because it's a very valid point if somebody's paying 10 pound today for their set number of transactions. But then in six months time, it's going to cost them $1,000. That's just not not acceptable.
So it's going to be a case of providing tiered subscriptions and also looking at the transaction fee as the price goes up. Packages will also be flexible on price, I guess, and it depends on each customer on their needs. And it will be based on that moment that the requirements the customer needs. Yeah, because it's not one size fits all by any means.
I mean, it comes down to exactly what they want to use their site for exactly the transaction volume. There's so many different factors actually dictate how much Stratus they're going to need that it's definitely not one size fits all, but we're well aware of this problem and there's no way that we can hand off that cost to a client. So a client comes onto the platform now and they have an initial investment of, say, $10,000. We can't then the next time they've got to purchase the platform again, charging $100,000.
So we're well aware of this problem and we've got various approaches, various solutions to actually solve in that issue. And there is a huge amount of flexibility when it goes to a side change. Yeah, so there is a lot of play around area that we can provide in different approaches. What are the reasons behind the recent increase in value of Stratus and what is the investment story for Stratus from here?
I think several factors have caused the increase in value, but I think the main one is just the realization of what we're actually trying to build here. I mean, I've been involved in crypto for a few years now, so I know the landscape, well, there's been a lot of scams and a lot of projects that haven't delivered on their promises or have underachieved. And Stratus, I'd like to think that we've overachieved, so the valuation is sort of following our progress as a project. I mean, we're very open and visible in our development.
You can come into any of our development channels and every time a committee is actually committed to one of our repos, they actually post a message in the channels. So people constantly seeing the development take place and I mean, we're building as an organization. We're not just an all-kind anymore. We're well beyond that stage now.
We're building out a huge organization behind this project because I am a tech guy. I'm a developer. I'm not a business person in any way. So as part of my role as CEO, it was up to me to build that organizational team that has that knowledge.
And we've got a great team of advisors and consultants advising us in the background. So a lot of what people see and a lot of these cool moves that we're making are not just down to me or even down. There's so much input going into these decisions. Many developers want to come and contribute and write code and get the blockchain experience and get their name there on GitHub.
And we welcome them. We want everyone to come and contribute and help us deliver the platform. We will all benefit from it. Yeah, but as far as I'm concerned, we have not really seen anything yet.
Yeah, we just get inspired to yes, we're in first gear. Awesome. So how do you plan on explaining to potential clients of the platform? Why the stratus token and cryptocurrencies in general are so volatile in terms of price?
Well, we hope one day to get to a place where we don't have that huge volatility. I mean, if you look at the stratus price after the recent increases, we've been pretty stable. And we hope that we will maintain that moving forward, but volatility is just something that is part of the game with crypto. And there's nothing you can really do about it.
We can explain the reasons behind it, but it's just, yeah, it just comes with the comes with it. Cryptocurrencies are volatile, yeah, so not much to do about it right now, which is a trade is dream. That is also true. So will it ever be possible to stake via a ledger wallet?
So probably not at the moment, I mean, we have some ideas on the ability to stake only with public keys. The problem is it's taking us to need the private key available to sign the new transactions. But we have some ideas of how to solve that. But then you could keep your private keys on the ledger wallet and you would still have to run some staking server somewhere.
But this is probably a bit further down the line. Okay, so that was it for the general questions. So shall we move on to side chains and smart contracts? Yes.
Okay. So first question. Can you explain what an integration with other, with other coins like Blitz would bring to the table? So some Blitz would benefit from the development model of the strategy.
They won't have to support their coinbase maintenance or upgrades. They would just have to be able to focus on their business side of Blitz. And the strategy platform would just do everything when it comes to the technology aspect. Exactly.
Yeah, and they also get development support from us as well. So traditionally, most of the altcoins out there running on very, very old versions of Bitcoin core. So normally around zero dot nine, which is doesn't have, I would say 60 to 70% of the features we now have in Bitcoin. So they're constantly trying to upgrade this code basic.
If Bitcoin releases a security patch, it's an absolute nightmare for these altcoins to implement those security patches. And a lot of these altcoins don't even have any C++ developers in house. So they're in a situation where how do they implement this patch that's crucial to the security of their network. Whereas on the stratus platform, they don't have to worry about that.
As soon as Bitcoin releases a security patch within a couple of days, it will be available when their code base. And it allows them to concentrate on their platforms like the viral exchange and fit aligns. What rather than worrying about the underlying blockchain and they also get access to all of the functionality available on a stratus platform. So things like tumble bit and private transactions, they will instantly have access to without having to go through that whole development cycle, which we are.
When implementing projects like the C-sharp token, will this be a sidechain or will it be a tradable asset on the mainchain? Is there an idea to put such assets on exchanges as well or not? Or is it not technically possible? Yeah.
Any of our assets will probably be deployed on sidechains. That's most likely. And definitely tradable. One of our main goals is to get the stratus platform deployed on some exchange.
And that will definitely improve its capabilities and its technology. Show its technology strength. And we also hope one day to have a stratus trading market. So like you have Ethereum trading markets on Belonyex.
We'd like to have stratus trading markets. Whether that will happen on Belonyex or not, I'm not sure. But we have a very good relationship with the Bitrix guy. So it's definitely something that we're going to be exploring in future.
But yeah, we will be working with the exchanges to get any sidechains on the stratus platform listed. So we'll do everything to that power to make that happen because obviously the sidechain tokens have got to be tradable against whether it's BTC or STRAP in order for it to have a monetary value. Yeah. Deploying on an exchange is definitely a must and something we're very much committed to achieve.
But we have very good relationships with exchanges so it shouldn't be a problem at all. Okay. Will there in the future be a completely private protocol for those sidechains that want that similar to Monero or is he cash? Yeah, so it goes back to the answer that I gave earlier and that we're going to be making extensive changes to the tunnel bit protocol in order for us to be closer to the likes of Dash and Monero.
So I can say now that in future we will have a privacy offering that's comparable to those projects. Would it also be possible for a sidechain to implement their own unique proof of work or can they only use the ones the stratus provides? I read there will be several POW proof of work to choose from. Yeah, definitely.
Sidechains they come in many flavors and when they're basically it's down to the implementers of the site chain what kind of mining algorithm they want to run and they will have available a variety of examples to run that we already have implemented in C sharp from proof of work SHA to X 13 proof of stake or hybrid proof of stake and proof of work even what we like to call proof of authority where master notes will actually be validating blocks on a sidechain. So the sidechain doesn't need to worry about the security or the mining aspects and it's all taken care by master notes and then obviously master notes can collect fee for that work. Could a currency like tether function on a stratus sidechain what are the difficulties to accomplish that? It definitely can the one of the main ones are the fear gateways so when you want to move out of that tethered US dollar currency into actual real world fear money that that's definitely one of the one of the hurdles that we must overcome but we definitely will have definitely will have US dollar Teva type assets available on side chains and also on the main chain.
Are there any plans for blockchain pruning at all or is it even necessary? So our full technology already supports pruning and we were also looking at the UTXO migration tools basically when your sidechain becomes very full of data very bulky then you'll be able to migrate your UTXO set or your smart contract data to a new sidechain start or continue from that sidechain onwards. But definitely we already support pruning on one of our platform. Okay, so how many stratus will be approximately needed to run a sidechain?
So there is no right answer here I guess. It depends on the sidechain on how the developers want to implement it and how many tokens they want to burn on the stratus platform and the stratus blockchain and move over to the sidechain that they are creating. But we hope to provide a low cost option for companies that might not necessarily have the funds for the upfront investment of why the stratus so it comes back to its totally dependent on their use case transaction volume and various different other factors but this is one of the benefits of having stratus consultants is we can come in and work with you as a business to get the answers to these questions and to help you define these requirements. So will I have to run my own servers or purchase cloud services to run a sidechain?
We're going to have many different options you'll be able to host your service in the cloud and we're also going to have on-premise solutions. So a lot of financial institutions will not allow their data to leave their organization to leave their refunds. So what they do is they have on-site infrastructure which we call on-premise so we will have on-premise solutions and also cloud-based solutions. You can even run your own notes or we can operate the notes for you so we're all about flexibility here and we're just trying to provide a platform that's flexible that fits all of the different use cases that are going to come up in the next few years.
At the end of the sidechains are standalone, executable, they can run on servers on your home computer, they will have to run on exchanges if they want to be traded and the infrastructure will have to be provided somewhere. So it's up to the implementers and it's also up to the size of the community that's going to use the sidechain. Now what are the limitations if any of being a sidechain? I can't think of any limitations.
It depends on the sidechain but for example if it's a one-way peg, one off one-way peg then maybe limited supply. But I think a better question would be what are the limitations of the mainchain as opposed to a sidechain? Because one of the benefits of a sidechain is you can make changes almost at will to your sidechain so changes that would never get implemented on a stratus mainchain can be implemented on a sidechain. So one of the use cases that I always explain to people is if you had a sidechain off of a sidechain, if you had a sidechain that supported some game in environment but then you needed additional sidechains for each game in element inside that game, that would be a perfect example where the mainchain would not fit but a sidechain it would be technically possible.
So that's all the questions that I have for sidechains and smart contracts. Will we like to speak about the future of stratus? So what is next for stratus? What about investment?
What is the current burn rate of stratus funds? When do you expect stratus to be self-sufficient? We expect stratus to be self-sufficient within the next 12 months but we're going to be raising a series of funding within the next two months. So we're going to have an injection of capital.
We're not worried about funding at all. I mean, in our initial interview with Ty and Leon, one of the issues that Leon raised was funding. Did we have enough funding? It was his main concern.
We've not spent half of our funds and we've practically delivered on all of the promises that have been made so we're in a very good position and also we have a huge amount of stratus available for development which is actually worth three times as much as a Bitcoin we hold. So as far as funding is concerned, we're not concerned at all. We've got funding to see us for the next probably four years but we hope in four years to be a completely different organisation, a huge multinational. We're not worried about funds at all.
We have lots of funding and we have even more motivation. Exactly. That's a pretty good combination. One thing I would like to speak about is, at the moment, we're defining our pitch deck that's going to be used for their VC funding for a series eight.
So we'll have a pack that will go out to venture capitalist firms and it will have all of the information about Stratus, our business plan, revenue model, budget plans, all of the information that's required and we've actually made quite a big shift on our focus because it was all built around Stratus as a company, our blockchain, as a service offering and one of our advisors Kent Langley who's a director at Red Hat. I mean Red Hat is one of the largest open source projects but what I really like about Red Hat is they built a successful business behind that open source project. He's got a very good knowledge and experience to add to the project and when the guys were giving him the final pitch for the final approval, he actually stopped them in their tracks and said, we're not talking about one of the things that's the most exciting factor about Stratus and that is the Stratus token and the Stratus blockchain. So now what's happened is we've made a complete shift and our whole business, the whole Stratus consultancy is all built around the token and the benefits of the token and this quite large market cap that we've got around in 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's going out to the venture capital this phone, I think they'll be very happy because I know some people have concerns about, okay so you have Stratus consultancy but how does that add value to Stratus is the token. Well I can tell everybody now we're building Stratus consultancy around Stratus the token and it's just one more thing I want to mention as well is Cloud Stratus. So originally the idea for Cloud Stratus was that it will be an orchestration platform and we would build our own data center environment. After our visit to the C-Shot Corner and speaking with Magnus who's regional director of Microsoft as your MVP and probably one of the greatest ones out there around Azure and Azure consultancy and we had a great chat with him about our Cloud Stratus platform and our approach and I can tell everyone now that we're no longer deploying our own data center solution, it's going to be built on Microsoft's Azure.
We're commonly working with the Microsoft Azure team on that approach and exactly how we can get there and for the first time in Stratus was started we're actually feeling some real support from Microsoft. I mean we've got the Azure listing that we got last year sometime but other than that we haven't really had that much support from Microsoft but now we've got several regional directors behind us. We've got Magnus who's Azure MVP and what's closer to the Azure team. We're actually working directly with the Azure team and we've been told that they're going to reach out to other teams at Microsoft so we can really push things along because they understand they can see what we're building.
We're building everything around Microsoft technologies and Microsoft stack so it's just a natural evolution that we would come together. So I think we're going to see some very interesting things down the road between the two companies and everything that we the majority of the code that we develop is around C sharp and dot net core so that is heavily heavily integrated with Microsoft. It gives us a benefit most definitely. And then one of our first goals will be to try and deploy the strategy platform on the Azure marketplace and that's what we discussed yesterday on the chat with that's in progress.
Yeah that's in progress so as far as I'm concerned the first step is that we have the same level of partnership and support that Ethereum receives that's the first step and then the second step is a deeper integration with the Stratus platform cloud and cloud stratus and Microsoft Azure so that's been finalized and I can tell everybody now that cloud stratus will be built on Microsoft Azure platform. Awesome so can you talk a little bit about growth plans and will you be seeking for investment. So as far as growth plan where we work to the EXO methodology which is exponential growth and say is our who's one of our board members is one of the top EXO consultants out there so fire his consultancy company he's actually built a team of world class consultants and advisors around this EXO methodology that we're currently implemented. We're defining all of our growth strategies growth plans and those types of things so I think you'd be very hard press to find another blockchain startup that's got the growth planning behind it that Stratus has.
So lastly what is your long term vision for the company. That's a very good question so I think it's easy for my technology point of view I'd like Stratus to be one of the platforms that is offered by Microsoft like NBC or WCF or windforms and Stratus will hopefully be one of those platforms where developers in the C-shop community will come over if they need blockchain capabilities they will come Stratus will be the first thing they think of they will come over and use the platform. But as far as long term vision we want to cement ourselves as the go to platform for enterprise organization so if an enterprise organization is looking at blockchain technology we want Stratus to be the first name that comes up and we do have a long road getting there but we're definitely in a very good position at this point and we're building the organization behind Stratus we're building the development team and also the marketing, promotional strategies, growth hacking strategies behind it and all of this is sort of claimed into the small amount of success that we've seen so far but like I said before we're not even in first gear. We're really not, nobody's seen anything yet there's so much more to come from Stratus project and once we start delivering analytics and people can see GUIs that they can touch and feel I expect there to be many many more happy days for us.
I see it's reflected in the price it's kind of a vote of confidence we're seeing in the last few months. I mean we try not to speculate on price or talk about price because we just don't think that it's right for us to do that but everybody knows what my goal is my goal is top free market cap and I see anything else is a failure so the future is right. Policarpo or Jeremy would you like to chime in with your own maybe long-term goals of what you think will happen with Stratus. Well, yes, in my role I see creative organizations, Chris has a vision and to make it as big as possible and across many different geographies across different industries.
And we have big plans to start operations in India which is an on top market for two currencies. We have the market of the Americas where Microsoft is the leader 80% of their sales are in the Americas and we have excellent relationships not only in North America but also in South America. And from experience working there so we see a lot of potential there being in the Stratus solutions and you know are talking or know how that. So that will be our job for the coming months to start creating the organization new hires bringing new people in marketing is development and all the areas that we need extra support.
Okay, well is there anything else you would like to address that maybe the questions didn't didn't get you to talk about today. I'm not feeling pretty much covered everything I mean if anyone else has further questions or they'd like us to go more in depth on anything then you can either direct message myself or just ask on on slap but I'd like to thank the community for their continued support. Definitely one of the main benefits of the Stratus platform and the Stratus project is our community we have one of the best communities are comfortably say in the crypto space. Some crypto communities can have quite a lot of negativity flowing through the community but we don't seem to have any of that but I mean when everybody's 50 times their money you're not going to have that much negativity.
So I guess we need to look at the situation on a day where we're not at 20 plus and we're at 20 minus and see if the negativity creeps in but yeah I just want to thank everyone for their continued support. It means a lot to myself the dev team all of the organization the guys behind in the background that no one sees can see the support that we've got and they just think it's absolutely amazing they've never seen anything like it before. Thank you guys for your continued support and we will keep working in delivering and just watch your space. So thank you very much for organizing this highly and I want to continue.
Thank you very much. You were wonderful and very gracious to help us and we expect to have this type of meetings accordingly. We would like to do more frequently we will see time time permitting how we can organize it with a different locations we are currently. So thank you very much and I really appreciate it and let's do this again and any information you will from us and any special promise you want to make around the strategy.
And thanks to your subscribers and your time as well. All right well yeah thanks for having me host this really informed of question and answer forum and if you all are satisfied I will conclude this broadcast. Thank you very much. Bye bye.
Thank you.