Overview
2020 has been a tough year for everyone. The global pandemic struck us unexpectedly and has changed our lives in many aspects. However, the lockdown and travel ban have brought us to a new subject: We have probably underestimated how far the Internet has gone to become the crucial part of our daily life. Working, shopping, working-out, entertaining at home, none of these would be possible if we did not have a reliable and accessible Internet. Humankind now relies on it more than we could ever imagine.
Therefore, building the new era for Web 3.0 seems to be an even more important thing to all of us. The pandemic does not only create problems but also heighten opportunities.
Fortunately, all the hard work had paid off. NKN concludes 2020 on a very high note, with quite a few business and technology achievements. we had launched our core products such as nMobile and nConnect on top of the dataRide platform, and won two strategy partnerships with Synology and ASUSTOR. We are also under consideration by Coinbase Custody and actively traded on Uniswap as one of the most vibrant DeFi exchanges. We went through difficulties and problems, but we’re striving towards progression and goals.
Technology and Products
This year, we achieved technology advancements, expanded network growths, and also brought two major products to light.
We’ve fulfilled our goal as the largest blockchain network in the world with an average of over 30,000 nodes on our network. Nodes do fluctuate, but our highest score of the year was at 34,000 nodes in a live production network.
We launched nMobile at the beginning of August, an instant messaging tool based on NKN’s blockchain powered distributed communication system. With e2e encryption, true private key, local data storage and decentralized identity as its true nature, nMobile earns better trust and confidence than several popular chat apps that are already on the market.
nConnect, another major product that we released in 2020 proved its unique advantage through major commercial success. Two leading enterprises in the NAS industry, Synology and ASUSTOR, signed a strategy partnership with NKN in October and December this year on each other’s heels. nConnect provides the solution to remotely access files and apps in NAS, with a standout combination of security, speed and affordability with easy integration.
Commercialization
As mentioned above, NKN signed two business contracts with top tier NAS vendor Synology and ASUSTOR with our product nConnect. The apps are available for download in respective NAS vendors’ app market, and boast a subscription based revenue model.
With these partnerships, customers of both Synology and ASUSTOR will now have an easy solution that grants them to keep their data within their home/ enterprise network far from predators, while still being able to securely access them from any remote location. As one of the first few software to support Synology DSM version 7.0, nConnect has attracted quite a lot of interest and many demands to go on the legacy 6.2 version where more clients rely on.
Token and Exchanges
In 2020, we are continuing our exploration to new crypto exchanges for NKN token holders around the world.
In July this year, we supported trading on Uniswap, one of the leading decentralized exchanges of DeFi. Later in October, we are being considered by Coinbase Custody, one of the most trusted custody of digital assets in the world. We are currently working with different US based exchanges and making progressions towards eventual listing.
Vision of the Future
We made quite a few accomplishments in 2020, yet we do not stop here. 2020 has improbably emphasized and reinforced the importance of the Internet to us all, we’d like to see it as a silver lining in the clouds of the pandemic. In the coming year, we plan to optimize our products and technology while pushing more on the marketing and commercial side to gain more customer base, recognition and business success. Our updated roadmap beyond 2020 illustrates some of the directions we are taking, and the bigger ambitions we have.
Community
Our community is something that we value greatly. We could not achieve as much without the support and love from them.
In mid of December, Surge, an evolutional P2P file sharing client of 100% anonymous, secure and decentralized nature, was launched. It is an amazing work from our community developer team @Rule 110 and uses the NKN blockchain network for all communication. They are amazing developers with devotion and creativity! Therefore Surge won the NKN Foundation Special Award 2020 and 2 million NKN tokens.
We are more than thankful to all of the members of our community and we truly believe that a new Internet better than ever is for us to build together.
At the very end of this review, we wish you all a very happy holiday and a wonderful coming year!