Releasing Meerkat, NKN’s Final Testnet

Posted on January 18, 2019

January 18th, 2019

Today, we are thrilled to announce the release of Meerkat (NKN’s testnet v0.7) two weeks ahead of schedule. Meerkat is the final testnet release which includes a full featured testnet with complete implementation, strong security and enhanced performance, plus SDK release. This is a significant milestone in our technology development towards our mainnet release.

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

Release highlights

The highlights of Meerkat release are:

MOCA consensus module rewritten:

Much stronger security: resistant to various attacks including sybil attack, timestamp attack, collusion attack, multi-proposal attack
Greatly improved stability: automatically transit between consensus and sync state using finite state machine to recover from transient network problem

Greatly enhanced network layer:

Strong resistance against malicious and spam message: enforced verification on all message signature, message type and routing type
At least 70x more efficient block/transaction broadcasting
Implemented latency-based proximity routing to achieve up to 100% faster relay message

Block synchronization module rewritten:

Secure and robust: locally BFT-level robustness against malicious and faulty neighbors
Blazing fast: up to 10x faster block synchronization

New features: Pub/Sub

Implemented Pub/Sub function: NKN address can now subscribe to any topics through wallet sdk and receive messages sent to these topics through client sdk, which can be used to discover and subscribe to useful application service running on top of NKN platform. One example is that you can now easily find other people to play Space Cats 3D game with you.

In addition, we have released a new Golang SDK with both client and wallet implemented:

Go SDK

we have also updated our JavaScript SDK:

It is worth mentioning that community member John Smith has released an updated version of NKN Java SDK with both client and wallet implemented and documented:

Java SDK

For miners and NKN users, community member ChrisT and lightmyfire have developed and released nknX, a NKN blockchain explorer + mining node manager + wallet tracker:

nknX

GitHub code update stats

Our GitHub stats shows the substantial amount of work done for Meerkat: 128 files have changed, 12,451 lines of new code were written, replacing 7,208 lines of old code.

Look ahead

Our next big milestone Mainnet Beta, called Beluga v0.9, is scheduled for March 2019. We will continue to improve scalability and performance as well as attack resistance.

We have also tentatively planned to add an intermediate Mainnet Preview (release v0.8) before March, where all the non-backward compatible upgrades will be deployed such as wallet migrating from UTXO to Balance model and changing elliptic curve to 25519 for better performance.

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.