Companies need STRAT to start up their own chain and those STRAT get burned. What do you mean, they are not required?
Can anyone confirm this? Is it in the white paper?
My understanding is the coins don't get burned, and it also clearly doesn't matter that they don't get burned. Strat will increase in value as more people wish to use its multi-faceted platform. It's that simple. This isn't a Ripple rip off scheme to falsely inflate value by burning, uhhhhhh errrrrrrr, "locking up" coins. The main way coins will be removed from circulation is the operation of Masternodes, the one announced level that is currently for sure being 250K Stratis to run a Masternode. The total supply of Strat will be about 98,300,000, INCLUDING whatever is taken out of circulation by people running Masternodes. There will also be lower levels of Masternodes performing different tasks. Those haven't been announced yet in terms of the numbers of Strat required to run them, but I think it's safe to assume they will look something like 100K, 50K, 25K in order to run those lower levels of nodes, and it has already been officially announced there will definitely be lower-level nodes, the finer details of which will soon be announced. Then, those coins required for the lower levels will also leave circulation as more people decide to run those sorts of lower-level nodes.
So, there will consistently be coins leaving circulation, and there will consistently be more demand to use those coins due to Strat's unique platform written fully in C#. Devs like this because they don't need to learn a new programming language to build on the Stratis Platform, as is complicatedly required to build something using Ethereum. No offense meant to Ethereum, but that is a fact. Stratis is more accessible to a huge amount of devs who are already fluent in C#, so the demand for Strat consistently increasing is pretty easy to see happening for multiple reasons, not all of which I bothered to mention.
One final thing I will bother to mention is that Strat's sidechains will all be built on the BTC blockchain, and will allow sidechain upon sidechain to be used on the BTC blockchain. It is completely complimentary to Bitcoin. New sidechains can also be built upon any Strat sidechains, all without increasing bloat on BTC's blockchain (or any other Stratis sidechains). We all know there is no more secure of a blockchain than Bitcoin's, and that is one more enormous feather in the Stratis cap. Businesses will like having their private sidechains running on what is widely accepted to be the most secured and well-known king daddy blockchain of them all. All this is pretty incredible once you start to fully absorb what is possible, and I haven't even mentioned the capabilities of Stratis Platform's new Breeze wallet yet...
An alpha Breeze wallet has already been publicly released (with full, concise instructions for anyone interested in messing around with that in a testing environment). Breeze will soon enter beta testing, and it is expected to be commercially released as a full working version before the end of June.
The bottom line of all this is that Strat is just getting started, and you ain't seen nothing yet. The price has plenty of reasons to keep dramatically increasing following the commercial version of the Breeze wallet being released, but a huge jump can and should be expected when that commercial version drops, so if I were you, I would buy in as soon as possible. No one knows exactly when the Breeze wallet will be announced as a proper commercial release, but it can safely be expected Breeze will be commercially released before the end of June. Strat's team has met or exceeded every promise on their timeline since their humble beginning in mid 2016, and it has been repeatedly stated that the Breeze wallet will be working as a proper release in Q2 of 2017.