The Roberts Space Industries website announces the release of a patch for Star Citizen, updating the alpha version of Cloud Imperium's space game to version 2.4, calling this the "biggest and most important update since Star Citizen Alpha 2.0." This adds new currency and purchase options to the game, imbues their persistent universe with some actual persistence, and puts more virtual items on sale, and more. This post has the detailed patch notes, and here's an overview:

Star Citizen Alpha 2.4 is now live! This major update to Star Citizen’s persistent universe is now available in your launcher. Alpha 2.4 introduces the first iteration of in-game persistence and shopping, as well as major changes to the controls, updates to the ship roster (including making the massive Starfarer flyable in-game), bug fixes, balance updates and more! In short, this is our biggest and most important update since Star Citizen Alpha 2.0.