NKN Bi-weekly Report July 2-15, 2019

Posted on July 16, 2019

Highlights

Mainnet Tech Development, Feature Highlights and Upgrade Guide
BlockGroup announces strategic investment in NKN
IoTalks Interview with Bruce Li and Allen Dixon
1-click NKN node image updated for mainnet on 3 cloud platforms
Mining Bonus Address (MBA)
nCDN and nanopay: community Q&A
POR and The Daily Chain review NKN
Community contribution: firmware, mining guides, and tools

Mainnet technical development updates

During the last two weeks since we release mainnet Narwhal, we have issued three minor revisions to fix bugs and improve security. Some encouraging stats:

🌐 49 countries

🏭 266 ISPs or cloud providers

💻 26,198 full consensus nodes and rising

📀 3 minor revisions to fix bugs and improve security

NKN mainnet code development progress over the last two weeks is mainly reflected in nkn, nnet, nkn-wallet-js, nkn-client-js, nkn-sdk-go, nkn-crawler, web-ui, and nkn-cloud-image repositories and different branches.

Pull Request: 20

Commits: 57

The latest stable release for mainnet is v1.0.3-beta.

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

NKN Mainnet v1.03beta

Adjust consensus parameters for better convergence
Excluding outdated neighbors when prefilling votes

NKN Mainnet v1.02beta

Attempts to fix the recent issue that some nodes get stuck occasionally

NKN Mainnet v1.01b beta

Disable register name transaction for now due to the recent abuse. It will come back later when there is a proper economic mechanism
Enhance txn verification when proposing block and remove invalid txn from pool if not passing verification

Mainnet Release: Feature Highlights and Upgrade Guide

On July 1st, NKN launched Mainnet v1.0 narwhal release and to date nearly 26K+ full nodes are running globally. Thank you to our development team and our community for making this such a great success.

Here is a short list of highlighted features:

Change account model from UTXO model to balance model
Change signature scheme from ECDSA to Ed25519
Implement a secure and verifiable public key infrastructure
Use VRF to provide a secure random beacon per block
Introduce NanoPay: a simple light-weighted off-chain nano payment channel
Signature chain data structure redesigned: reduce 97+% bandwidth overhead
Highly optimized block, transaction, sigchain propagation: reduce 80+% overall bandwidth usage
Support client-side end to end encryption by default
Support node side hop to hop encryption by default
Implement connection multiplexing to avoid congestion
Store account and other state in verifiable world state
Migrate core data structure (e.g. block, transaction) to protobuf
Transaction pool redesigned
Support multiple native assets
Add mining bonus address (MBA) for extra earning reward from donation
NKN node image is now hosted on Docker Hub 9: you can now run full node in one line

For more detailed information about how to build, configure, and run a node, please see the latest github readme at https://github.com/nknorg/nkn

If you are running one-click miner on DigitalOcean, AWS or Google Cloud, you just need to grab a drink and restart your one-click miner machine, and the rest will be automatic.

For more information on how to setup a one-click on your favorite cloud platform, follow the links below:

NKN MainNet v1.0-beta Release: Feature Highlights and Upgrade Guide:

https://forum.nkn.org/t/nkn-mainnet-v1-0-beta-release-feature-highlights-and-upgrade-guide/1183

BlockGroup announces strategic investment in NKN

BlockGroup, parent company of BlockVC, announced a strategic investment in NKN on July 3rd. Based on BlockGroup’s comprehensive analysis, the NKN project has made significant strides in all fronts including product development, technology research, and global exchange footprint. These additional investment will strengthen the operational capital of the project team. In addition, BlockGroup partners with the project teams in community development, industry analysis, capital management, ecosystem development and more, in order to create long term value.

BlockGroup, a $200M M&A crypto fund, announces strategic investment in NKN:

https://forum.nkn.org/t/blockgroup-a-200m-m-a-crypto-fund-announces-strategic-investment-in-nkn/1249

IoTalks Interview with Bruce Li and Allen Dixon

On July 12th, NKN’s partner IoTex launched their latest episode of IoTalks featuring NKN Co-Founder, Bruce Li, and VP Business Development, Allen Dixon. This interview covers the past, present, and future of connectivity and we also share some insights from NKN and our new nCDN and secure messaging services as well as emerging connectivity technologies like 5G and LoRaWAN emerging. Check out the full episode here.

Along with the IoTalks episode, NKN and IoTex are launching an IoTalks campaign. Tell us your best blockchain+IoT+connectivity use case and you could be a winner. To participate, follow the introductions in the post below.

IoTalks Campaign — IoTeX & NKN

https://forum.nkn.org/t/iotalks-campaign-iotex-nkn/1383

1-click NKN node image updated for mainnet on 3 cloud platforms

Our 1-click NKN node image has now been updated for mainnet and approved by all three leading cloud platforms DigitalOcean, Google Cloud Platform, and Amazon Web Service. Some of the highlights of this version:

Upgraded for Mainnet

Improved security: mandate one unique wallet per node. it is no longer possible to take a snapshot of one running node and clone.
Promote BeneficiaryAddr to further improve security: so the mining reward can be kept in secure wallet that is generated by user personally and not stored anywhere on the cloud.
Reduced resource usage: especially network bandwidth usage is reduced by at least 50%, since it is a major cost factor for some cloud platforms. Also reduced requirements on CPU and memory.

Of course we kept all the features and benefits our miners enjoy from testnet v0.8.x: health monitoring and auto healing, remote node status information, and etc. Currently we still support auto-upgrade during phase 1 of Mainnet for faster bug fix and network upgrade.

1-click NKN node image updated for mainnet on 3 cloud platforms:

https://forum.nkn.org/t/1-click-nkn-node-image-updated-for-mainnet-on-3-cloud-platforms/1413

Mining Bonus Address

With the launch of Mainnet v1.0 narwhal, we also introduced a Mining Bonus Address (MBA) that will be used to provide additional mining rewards to NKN miners. The MBA is a special NKN wallet address that can be used to transfer tokens in, but not take tokens out, similar to a deposit-only account. All the initial tokens mined from June 29th-July 1st have been added to MBA, and you are welcome to donate tokens to the address as well. Any tokens transferred into MBA will be added to extra mining rewards starting from the next mining year (1,576,800 blocks), with each year releasing half of the tokens remaining.

Mining Bonus Address and Why Mainnet started before July’1?:

https://forum.nkn.org/t/mining-bonus-address-and-why-mainnet-started-before-july-1/1182

nCDN and nanopay: community Q&A

On July 8th, Bruce Li answered community questions about NKN’s nCDN (content delivery) and nanopay (micropayment) services. nCDN will provide content delivery by caching video in multiple nodes for Video On Demand (VoD) or caching segments of video for live streaming across NKN’s network. Nanopay, will provide the payment mechanism for services such as nCDN on our platform. However, while these services were developed to showcase our technology and platform, our community is encouraged to develop their own services that use NKN as well.

Gigamesh’s questions about nCDN, nanoPay, and MBA:

https://forum.nkn.org/t/gigameshs-questions-about-ncdn-nanopay-and-mba/1334

NKN and nCDN related questions:

https://forum.nkn.org/t/nkn-and-ncdn-related-questions/1199

The Daily Chain reviews NKN Mainnet

Gigamesh of The Daily Chain reviews NKN’s Narwhal mainnet. Conclusions:

“NKN is now in Phase 1 of its updated roadmap and the focus is on security and stability. NanoPay and the nCDN trials are the big announcements from the Narwhal Mainnet release: a sensible mechanism for making high frequency off-chain payments, and trials for NKN as a decentralized CDN with a tier 1 Chinese provider that have already started. Plans for on-chain relay rewards and dapps have not been sidelined, as Bruce explains “We develop our own flagship product like nCDN to showcase our technology and platform”. NKN is pressing to develop services and harness the power of its 25K node network as quickly as it can.”

Read full report here:

https://www.thedailychain.com/blog/nkn-mainnet-narwhal-in-review-launch/

POR reviews NKN

Proof of Review (POR) recently published a review of NKN that provides an overview of the project as well as assesses NKN based on coin metrics, team, community, and more.

The overall rating is A- for NKN, with key conclusions:

valid use case with a potential global market for its product
no direct competitor with a similar product
experienced, competent team, notable and experienced advisors
strong development of partnerships in the crypto ecosystem and external markets.

You can read the full report here.

Community contributions

Run NKN on Vultr

Thanks to community member MiserableOracle, for providing instructions on how to run NKN on the Vultr cloud platform. This guide provides detailed instructions on how to start an instance as well as manually install and configure an NKN node which includes content authored by Christian Busch and Temptaz as well.

Run NKN Node on Vultr — Detailed Tutorial:

https://forum.nkn.org/t/run-nkn-node-on-vultr-with-free-50-promotional-credit-detailed-tutorial/1366

Deploy NKN Full Node on ASUS Wifi Router

Thanks to community member Allen, Narwhal Full Node has been successfully ported to 4 ASUS wifi routers including: RT-N56U, RT-N56UB1, RT-N65U, RT-AC1200HP

Deploy NKN Full Node on ASUS Wifi Router:

https://forum.nkn.org/t/deploy-nkn-full-node-on-asus-wifi-router/1314

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.