NKN Bi-weekly Report Aug 20 — Sept 9, 2019

Posted on September 10, 2019

Highlights

Towards NKN 2.0: roadmap beyond mainnet
“Planet Hopping” or “Galactic Express”: two modes of data transmission
A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Fees in NKN: NKN’s solutions to Spam and DDoS attacks
nCDN update: 3 major pieces, www.nkn.org hosted on nCDN, early results
d-FTP file transfer tests: faster than WeChat and QQ
New Kind of Proposal — NKP-0014, NKP-0015
D-chat updates to v3.2.5

There are great amount of development work going on during this reporting period, which can be observed by the amount of Pull Request and Commits in our code base. In addition to continuously hardening and optimization of mainnet code, we double down on nCDN product development and customer trials, ramp up efforts on NKN mobile wallet app development, explore partnership with consumer home device vendors, and expand our commercial customer funnel.

Mainnet technical development updates

Latest Mainnet Stats September 9th, 2019:

🌐 39 countries

🏭 192 ISPs or cloud providers

💻 14,903 full consensus nodes

📀 1 new release

NKN mainnet code development progress over the last two weeks is mainly reflected in nkn, nkn-sdk-go, nkn-wallet-js, nkn-client-js, nkn-sdk-py3, nkn-multiclient-js, documentations, nkn-file-transfer, nkn-java-sdk, and consequential repositories and different branches.

Pull Request: 37

Commits: 135

The latest stable release for mainnet is v1.1.0-beta.

(https://github.com/nknorg/nkn/releases )

NKN Mainnet v1.1.0-beta

Version 1.1 is a major release that introduced web GUI dashboard, new crypto puzzle mechanism, new txn type, and performance optimization. Feature highlights:

Add a web-based GUI dashboard that can be used to show node status and change configurations. By default the dashboard can be accessed from browser at http://127.0.0.1:30000. Note: in order to build the dashboard from source, you need to have Node.js (v10 or higher) and yarn installed. But you don’t need them if you download the release version.
Reduce memory usage (and we are working on further reduce it in the future)
Reduce disk IO usage when txn pool is full
When new wallet joins the network for the first time (generate ID), it now needs to solve a crypto-puzzle which should take about 15 mins on average
Faster block sync with default parameter
Allow resubscribe and unsubscribe

The Road to NKN 2.0

On August 27th, NKN published “NKN Roadmap beyond Mainnet: an August 2019 update”. This August 2019 update covers the feature roadmap for Mainnet technology and token economics leading to NKN 2.0. Also included are the priority and timeline for the commercialization of new products such as nCDN, Pub/Sub, and TUNA/NanoPay that were recently announced. Check out the forum post for more details.

“Planet Hopping” or “Galactic Express”

On August 24th, we published ““Planet Hopping” or “Galactic Express””, an inside look at how NKN is changing the way data is being sent over the internet.

NKN provides 2 distinct methods to send data across the network: “Fast and Secure” or “Direct and Faster”. For Fast and Secure transmission, traffic is sent over NKN’s P2P network using CHORD distributed hash table for secure and verifiable transmission with routing improvements for latency and multi-path for accelerated performance. In Direct and Faster, NKN allow app users to connect directly to a single node for even faster performance. These apps include: nCDN — New Kind of Content Delivery Network, and TUNA for universal tunneling for any application.

Check out the article for more details and visit the forum to join the conversation.

A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Fees in NKN: NKN’s solutions to Spam and DDoS attacks

NKN is introducing both technical and economic changes to NKN’s blockchain to counter Spam and DDoS attacks. This is in-line with our new roadmap, that includes scalability and security being a focus for Mainnet Phase1 (2019Q3). Highlighted in the article, “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Fees in NKN: NKN’s solutions to Spam and DDoS attacks”, there are limits to the number and storage size of free/low-cost transactions included in each block. We are also introducing a fee for name registration, as well as adding a small Proof of Work puzzle during ID generation. By introducing fees, and limiting free transactions we can significantly increase the cost of Spam and DDoS attacks and make NKN more reliable and robust for everyone.

nCDN update: 3 big pieces fitting together

We have three big pieces going well for NKN’s nCDN product:

Software: our backend to deploy large scale nCDN servers on mining nodes
Hardware: our partnership with consumer home product vendors
Business: our commercial negotiation with content owners

Did you know that we “eat our own dog food” and “fly our own jet”? https://www.nkn.org is now hosted on nCDN to improve global performance. In one of the early tests we achieved 3x improvement: average website download time reduce from 6.2s to 2.1s. We are continuing our optimization efforts and expanding our edge server footprint, so stay tuned.

https://www.dotcom-tools.com/website-speed-test.aspx#F98492D880A5434DA59243941A7CF114

NKN d-FTP: a direct and faster file transfer

In August 2019, a recent test of large file transfers over NKN mainnet using nkn-file-transfer (https://github.com/nknorg/nkn-file-transfer) shows we are 460% the speed of WeChat and 160% of QQ. We used 8 concurrent (randomized and secure) paths over NKN Mainnet, between PC clients in China and in California.

New Kind of Proposal — NKP-0014, NKP-0015

Two new NKPs were presented to the community over the past 2 weeks. These include topics: prevent generate ID txn spam, reduce database size. Check out the details below.

[NKP-0014] Use PoW to prevent generate ID txn spam (implemented in v1.1)
[NKP-0015] Removing inactive ID to reduce database size

Community contributions

D-chat updates to v3.2.5

D-Chat, a messaging client built on NKN, is evolving fast! v3.2.5 for Firefox is out now.

New features:

Clean UI with channel list
Private one-on-one chat
Home screen to show NKN ID, wallet address, balance
Tipping, faucet to welcome new user
Emoji reactions, Markdown support, and more

Kudos to our community member Lynn for the great work!

About NKN

NKN is the new kind of P2P network connectivity protocol & ecosystem powered by a novel public blockchain. We use economic incentives to motivate Internet users to share network connection and utilize unused bandwidth. NKN’s open, efficient, and robust networking infrastructure enables application developers to build the decentralized Internet so everyone can enjoy secure, low cost, and universally accessible connectivity.