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NKN midyear 2023 AMA poster

A conversation with our founders

Executive Summary

On Thursday 20th July 2022 over Twitter Space, NKN co-founders Bruce Li and Yilun Zhang (CTO) provided updates of the NKN project as well as shared thoughts about future directions. The topics covered at:

  1. NKN achievements up to mid-year 2023: Tech progression, Product updates, Business Development, Marketing new attempts, upcoming events, Community, Future plans/lite yearly roadmap.
  2. Share new trends and recent movements of the Web 3.0, as well as future plans for NKN.
  3. Q&A session: live questions on Twitter plus pre-collected from forum post: https://forum.nkn.org/t/upcoming-nkn-mid-year-ama-with-our-founding-team-on-twitter-space/5168

NKN Updates

Tech & product

  • Mainnet: continue improving the performance of the world’s largest blockchain network
  • TUNA: UDP release, now almost all applications are supported
  • nConnect: UDP release, network manager WIP, NAS vendors upgrade
  • nMobile: performance, zero trace off-chain private group, free ChatGPT bot, desktop version WIP
  • Universal Communication Service (see section below)

Community projects

  • Novio wallet (chrome plug-in) by Mutsi: just like Metamask, but for NKN Mainnet. Basic function is already stable, and continues to enable more web3 apps.
  • nStatus.org mempool real-time transaction browser by Mutsi
  • Reboot nknx.org mining portal by ChrisT: free for all NKN community, sponsored by NKN Foundation
  • Surge v2 by rule110 team: usage for enthusiasts, follow Discord channel
  • nRide: ride sharing app powered by NKN, recent test in Berlin

Market & Community

  • Major global events: present and evangelize NKN for developers and blockchain communities. ETHDenver, HK Web3 Summit, recruitment events
  • Exchange co-marketing: Binance Refer & Earn, CMC Twitter live event upcoming
  • Expand and grow in Korea: Korean language content on Naver/Medium, NKN Korean telegram, Blockchain Korea week in September
  • Guesting and Sponsoring: EthShanghai Twitter Space with Blockbeat, LensCN Hackathon, Hackathon events with AWS cloud in Fourth Quarter 2023

Expand & diversify

  • Launched Nolaris – our network in the sky.
    • Complimentary to NKN: NKN is sharing existing networks, Nolaris is building brand new satellite based Internet infrastructure. 
    • Beta test ongoing, visit launch website to learn how to participate.
  • Launched Universal Communication Service (UCS) & NKN Resolver during ETHCC Paris.
    • Map your existing web3/web2 identity to NKN address and use them for real time communication without creating new identity
    • Making NKN the equivalent of TCP/IP for future Internet: empower any web3 systems the ability to use NKN for real time communication, including cross chain communication
    • Expanding the scope of NKN ecosystem: NKN based applications can easily make use of other blockchain 
    • Ethereum resolver: all Ethereum compatible chains can use it today
    • DNS resolver: web2 IDs such as domain, email address can be mapped to NKN address as well today

Future

  • Improve developer support is critical for the success of infrastructure projects like NKN: improve documentation, clean up github public repositories, make it easy to build with SDK, simple to contribute, developer education and outreach, meaningful long-form hackathon, reward funds..
  • EVM: Universal communication service (UCS) provides an alternative way to access EVM in the NKN ecosystem: NKN based applications can use any Ethereum based blockchain for EVM and other on-chain features, cross chain identities are linked through UCS.
  • Develop and launch SocialFi app: a new kind of social network that combines the web 3 community features, and unique social ranking algorithm.
  • Implications of AI/Large Language Models: build beyond simple chatbot, combines web 3 aspect and NKN’s communication capabilities.
  • More exchange? Korean exchange with KRW pair, and future Japanese exchange. In the US: Kraken if the regulatory situation improves.

Q&A

Questions from forum:

“For nmobile, it seems the code is more difficult to build than many other Flutter projects, is it possible to improve the documentation, I am a developer and I want to add some features to it, what is the best way to contribute?” by Jerry49 

  • nMobile is indeed more complex to build because it’s a hybrid project using both Flutter and Golang, but we do have plans to make it easier. Actually we are planning to simplify the build process after the next release by providing the prebuilt Golang libraries. We will also improve the documentation to make it more clear and simple.

“For storage, if the NKN chat message and content are all encrypted, why can’t we also use traditional cloud providers such as Google (firebase) / Telegram (tdlib), the data should still be private right?” by Jerry49 

  • From a privacy perspective, uploading the encrypted data still leaks some information as it shows the existence of such data or even who you are chatting with. Whether it’s an issue depends on the application, so our SDK should never do that by default, but the application is free to upload encrypted data to traditional cloud storage.

“For resolver, currently, brc-20 and ordinals are very popular, and people have been experimenting with domain names with it recently, can NKN resolver support those as well?” by Jerry49 

  • Yes. The NKN resolver can support any system as long as there is a way to store a map from an address to a NKN address. For Bitcoin, that information can be stored in the transactions. But to make the system practical, one would need some sort of efficient indexing and lookup of that map, like a blockchain explorer.

Questions for Twitter session: 

Can we do the next ama with a desktop client and on the nkn network? – where is the desktop nmobile client, why the long delay for a browser based client? By Dan L

  • Yes we are working on the nMobile Desktop version, and voice and video call features are on the roadmap. We will release the Desktop version and source code, once we get the foundation right.
  • Browser based solutions cannot  utilize NKN’s unique network functionality in its full capacity, therefore we need native apps for Linux, Windows, and Mac.

– where does the ipv6 support any eta? By Dan L.

  • Not much code needs to be changed to support IPv6 in NKN node software. But IPv6 support on the NKN network level depends on how many miner’s servers will support native IPv6 addressing. IPv4 and IPv6 addresses cannot talk to each other without a bridge, thus the NKN network will split into two islands.

– will we still see smart contracts on nkn and if before the end of 2024? By Dan L

  • With UCS, applications can already combine NKN with a smart contract now with a (for example) Ethereum address mapped to a NKN address. Apps can use Ethereum for smart contracts and NKN for communication, and only one address needs to be exposed to the user.

Can you explain UCS further? By Dan L 

What is NKN’s relationship to Nolaris, will they have synchronicity? By Dan L

  • Nolaris is a sister project of NKN. NKN is focusing on sharing existing network infrastructure and capacity, while Nolaris intends to build out new infrastructure with satellite Internet. They are complimenting each other, and will share some key technologies.
  • If you are interested in Nolaris, you can find more information on the website

“Can you explain the usage/ general relationship between WEB3 tokens and CBDC’s such as $YUAN?” by Dolyn Duckett @GravelyBaking_

  • NKN is indirectly linked to USDT via the trading pairs on exchanges. When users of nConnect pay for services, they typically pay in USD/RMB/EUR. So there is a good use case for automatic conversion of fiat currency to Web 3 tokens such as NKN.

“When is possible using Nmobile for calls and video calls ?” by Roman Nosik @WideRoman

  • nMobile voice and video calls are on the roadmap. We are currently focusing on getting the foundation right: performance and stability. Also we will improve the nMobole code repository, so community developers can help us speed up the development in those features.