A Starry Night is a Story Night.

Starry is a short story e-reader built using the Stellar blockchain.

Starry is an app that runs on the Stellar network that is similar to Amazon Kindle. It is a short story reader, which, in the beginning, will use the Crypto Cat Stories.

How it works is that you open up a front page that has a list of submitted assets. This is the same as the list of assets for any other wallet in the Stellar network, except for the fact that these are manually curated by users. There will be a featured asset at the top, and eventually, there will be a list of subsections for a variety of assets. For now, there is simply the list with the assets logo, or cover as it is called in the Starry App, the name of the token, or its title, and a score*.

These assets are not like other assets on the Stellar blockchain that represent the token of a business. These are story tokens. Each asset has a story behind it like any other book. Limited to roughly 16,000 words in length these stories are all free to read, which is easy to do by clicking on the title or cover in the app.

Doing so brings you to that assets page, which is exactly like any other asset page in a Stellar wallet with one major exception, It includes a story where the usual Stellar asset would have its token description.

On this page, the cover and title, aka logo and asset name, are displayed at the top. Below is the story, which is free to read. At the bottom of the page is an Add Asset button. If a reader likes the story and wants to show support for the author the first thing they can do is add the asset trustline to their wallet.

Once they have added the asset they are able to Trade or Remove, just as they could with any other Stellar asset whose balance is zero. Trading simply means purchasing one or more of the assets from the author as a tip for the story. If they wanted to go further, once they own an asset the Trade and Send buttons will appear below the stories page, and this allows them to either resell their tip if there is a demand or to send the tip back to the author.**

The original idea was that the story itself would be converted to hex code and stored in the description of the asset in the toml file. This hex code was then read and converted by the Starry Reader, which was to be its core function. However, many Stellar wallets chose to exclude the hex code description from being displayed, and I am currently working on a more human-friendly story display.

Later versions will include ranking or voting features, the ability to change font size, as well as other functionality that allows a person to find and create specific stories.

*The score is yet to be determined but could include any of the following, either as a single option or as a number of options to sort for a specific asset. These include Overall traded volume, Number or Percentage of Trustlines funded or a Total Payments and Trades calculation to see what is being shared and supported the most. Something as simple as establishing a trustline could be considered a vote of confidence for that story, and the stories with the most truslines get ranked higher than those with less.

**Sending the tokens back to the author needs some specification because sending them back to the issuing account effectively burns them, part of the reason why the issuing account information is placed at the bottom of the story after Conditions, which is good for the author as they have already been paid for, but the assets can also be resold, sent back to the author to resell, or donated to a group charity that resells the assets to help a writing community to pay for the service of hosting the stories for historical purposes and creating tutorials for new authors.