Stratis is cryptocurrency and blockchain platform thats built on a C# Stratis Bitcoin full node. Bitcoin was written in C++. This has served the world’s largest cryptocurrency well, but there is a use case for expanding this development to the easier and newer C# language. The finished product is expected this year and once the adoption focused team has a working product they will start on onboard companies. Let’s take a deeper look at what they are trying to do, and how likely they are to do it.
The Straits headquarters is based in London, a global financial centre and a hub for fintech services. In July 2016, there was an ICO-Initial Coin Offering of STRAT to fund the development and marketing of the Stratis platform. They raised $610,908 towards building a platform on the C# Bitcoin Full node.
The CEO of Stratis, Chris Trew, actually approached and recruited Nicolas Dorier. He wrote the NBitcoin library, so it seems appropriate that he would be the one to build the Stratis platform on top of it.
The goal of Stratis is to simplify and accelerate development for blockchain projects. The large community of existing C# developers can use a language that they already know and the powerful APIs and framework.
It’s like an SDK for blockchain development. In an early interview in 2017, Chris Trew says that rather than focus on a single use case. He wanted to build a tool that could be applied to thousands of use cases; some that they hadn’t even thought of yet.
Stratis allows individuals and organisations to deploy their own blockchain without the overheads of having to establish their own network. People can download the full node and then add any of the modules they would like from the Github.
This allows all kinds of functionality like side chains and smart contracts. Startis is also trying to compete as a privacy coin by integrating their Breeze wallet with a trustless coin tumbler called TumbleBit.
Bitcoin tumblers are normally third-party services that anonymise transactions by mixing together a transaction with other coins in a pool and then sending them to the intended recipient. The problem with a lot of these Bitcoin tumblers, is that you are trusting a 3rd party to send your Bitcoins and there is no accountability if they don’t.
Privacy is also essential for corporate use cases. Business doesn’t want their competition to be able to see what assets they are buying an selling or reveal who their customers.
This is problematic on the Bitcoin blockchain where you can see every transaction since the genesis block was mined. “Tumblebit is basically a decentralized trustless mixer that works with the bitcoin protocol. Working as an unlinkable payment hub the platform aims to enable anonymous, off-chain transactions in real time.
The platform will deploy RSA assumption and ECDSA standard security practices which will provide anonymity and unforgeability within transactions. Furthermore, with Tumblebit’s off-chain method the protocol claims to scale efficiently.”
As law enforcement, analytics and businesses commit more resources to monitoring the blockchain, privacy will play a bigger role in what coins people choose to send. Having a decentralised tumbler built into the Breeze wallet is a powerful piece of functionality.
“A full node is an application whose goal is to keep track of valid blocks in the blockchain. It is essentially composed of several layers: Network Layer – this deals with which messages are exchanged between full nodes, and how. Consensus Layer – this sets the (blockchain-wide) rules for what is considered a valid block. Node Policy Layer – this adds more restrictive rules than the Consensus Layer to prevent DDoS (node-wide rule). Infrastructure Layer – governs how to store and verify blocks and transactions efficiently. Interface Layer – API for developers to query the state of the node, and/or user interface.” – Stratis GitHub
Protocols and processes can be changed and these distinct private blockchains will be maintained by their own full nodes. Third party organisations want to tailor their blockchain to their needs.
They can be accessed via lite clients and simple but powerful APIs. Because these Private chains are based upon the code of the main Stratis chain and side chains are compatible and transfer between the two is straightforward.
The underpinning parent chain is established to give users a high degree of security and a dependable finality. “For example, if a business requires large block sizes to accommodate a high volume of transactions; rapid block times to enable low-latency trading; controlled transactions so that only approved users can submit a request to the network; a given rate of inflation; or additional space for metadata in each block, any or all of these can be specified at launch. The private chain can be accessed by straightforward APIs, meaning that stand-alone applications can rapidly be developed.” – Stratis Whitepaper Coin Mechanics In the ICO 98 million STRAT tokens were created and released.
Unlike most cryptocurrencies, there is no fixed total supply for the STRAT token. A new block is derived via a POS mechanism about every minute. The block reward is 1 STRAT. This makes Stratis an inflationary cryptocurrency with an inflation rate of about 1440 new STRAT tokens a day. The yearly inflation rate is therefore about 0.0053%. Staking is like earning interest or dividends on your holdings. Stakers build the network by verifying that a block is correct.
They have a financial incentive to do this because if they don’t then the security deposit they submitted (called a stake) is submitted. The more a user stakes, the more likely it is that they will propose and be rewarded for the next block. It is 0.5-1% per annum returns on your “staked” amount.
Stratis was designed with the integration of fiat gateways in mind from the outset. They understand that real life business can’t function with digital assets alone. There are issues with compliance and most people don’t want to be paid in Ethereum.
For these reasons, they have allowed financial organisations to use the blockchain for the transfer of existing currencies that are both readily accepted by mainstream consumers and are not subject to damaging volatility. If company A wants to send USD to company B they can do so with tokens tethered to the values of regular money.
This ‘best of both worlds’ approach means that businesses can maintain compliance in whatever way they see fit, according to jurisdiction and organisational policy, whilst simultaneously using the blockchain as a store of value – with all the advantages
The CEO and founder of Stratis is Chris Trew. He doesn’t have much experience in the blockchain, and his LinkedIn still has his employment as Senior Technological Consultant at Xtravirt Limited, an IT consulting firm in Surrey.
Nicolas Dorier would be the another big name behind Stratis. He has an impressive repertoire as a developer and contributor to Bitcoin. He has made contributions to the Stratis GitHub core Libraries, and is continuing to develop NBitcoin which Stratis will soon fork.
Look there are worse cryptocurrencies out there. What Stratis is trying to do is revolutionary. There are roughly 6 million professional developers worldwide, about 90% of whom target Windows. 4-5 million of those 6 million developers targeting Windows is Visual Basic developers.
There are about 2.5 mln .NET developers. More than 60% of the Fortune 100 develop using.NET. Forrester says that 56% of enterprises in North America are choosing .NET for their development requirements vs. 44% choosing J2EE. Stratis is going to make it easier for all of these developers to build blockchain applications, smart contracts and corporate sidechains. This should shorten the development cycle and get a few applications to market.
If this activity happens on the Stratis network it will become one of the best long-term investment in the blockchain. Currently, we are in a very speculative market. Without a product, trading and investing is entirely responsible for the Straits price. I think that its connection to Bitcoin, the popularity of the C# and .NET languages, and the impending bull run all make Stratis a great investment.
Find out how to buy Stratis.