Stay Informed,
Stay Ahead

We are excited to announce the Stratis Blockchain Hackathon, our first major Stratis developers event of 2017 and we wanted to give you, our dedicated community, a head start.

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).

Welcome Stratisans! I have a strategic goal with this issue of the weekly, which is that by the time you have finished reading this, you will have UPDATED YOUR STRATIS WALLET TO v2.0.0.1. The wallet update is MANDATORY across ALL Operating Systems. The deadline for this is Saturday 19th November at 00:00:00 GMT! You MUST update your wallet here to v2.0.0.1 before the deadline. We don’t want to leave anyone behind so please do it now. Right, onwards. Dev Update This week we have reached a major milestone on our development calendar. The .NET core scheduled for Feb 2017 is now complete, and it’s only November! We are thrilled to be running ahead of schedule and in case you missed previous updates, due to hiding under rocks and so forth, the full node OSX competition is over and @dev0tion is successfully running it on OSX. We are now working hard on porting POSv3 to C# so we are hoping to bring you more exciting news on that really soon. Why Stratis is Unique? As you know our aim is to bring blockchain technology to you in C# .NET. but what you may not know is why it is an incredibly useful and important thing to do. We have decided to give you a little insight into what it is about Stratis that gets us out of bed in the mornings. The open source community may not have had much time for Microsoft’s closed systems in the past, but times are changing. Did you know .NET is now open source? Microsoft are getting up to speed and this presents a great opportunity for Stratis. We want to introduce blockchain to the huge community of developers working in C#.NET who no doubt work across a wide range of industries - C#.NET is a very popular language among the business community! By tapping into the potential of this community, Stratis hopes to accelerate uptake of the technology and popularise the development of new apps and services (on the Stratis blockchain of course). You may be surprised to know that C#.NET now has the following capabilities: You can write C# in any editor you want C# runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux C# has expanded to develop native iOS and Android apps (within 3rd party framework Xamarin) C# can also be used to build back-end and middle-tier frameworks and libraries. The latest version of C# is 7.0 which comes with new features such as including tuples, record types and pattern matching. Now for those of you who are wondering what the .NET bit is: .NET is the compiler platform that enables building code analysis tools with the same API’s that are used in visual studio. .NET supports all IDE’s and editors, linters and analysis tools, fixing and refactoring and code generation tools and all the scripting and REPLs. Have we converted you? Don’t forget that C# is still a young and impressionable language and new features are being decided by the community. The future looks bright for Stratis - here’s what our Dev Sigwo has to say on the matter: ‘The potential in Stratis is the ability for developers to code against a C# daemon to host their own private chains and Stratis has a great team to work with. Having a veteran bitcoin developer start the NStratis code puts Stratis in a different category of seriousness.’ Delayed Rewards for Staking Some of you may have noticed that staking has not been rewarding you as expected this week. This is because the Stratis team have been controlling the staking and will continue to do so until Saturday 19th November. Be assured rewards are still being accrued for POS work being done this week and you will receive these after Saturday. Have you read this far and still not updated your wallet? Do it now. And last, but certainly not least! - we want to give a special shout out to @Snip has developed a new web-app called StratisRate.com. It is surely the best resource around for checking in on $STRAT. Just some of the functions: Real-time rates for $STRAT in EUR, USD & BTC, 5 second refresh & desktop notifications. Great work @Snip! More excellent news coming soon, Stay Tuned.

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!

Cryptocurrencies are truly liberating - never before have individuals been able to take charge of their funds, independent of any financial institution.

Provisioning of Stratis blockchain nodes is now available on the Microsoft Azure platform.