NKN Testnet V0.3 Lemur Release

Posted on August 31, 2018

Today we are extremely excited to announce the on-schedule release of Testnet V0.3 Lemur, another key milestone in technical development by the NKN team. In this version, both functionality and performance of NKN’s system have been substantially strengthened .

Lemur key highlights:

Expanded testnet to over one thousand nodes globally and validated the core functions under stress testing.Completed periodic optimization of system scalability and efficiency.
Further developed NKN core system: strengthened the DDTN, PoR, MOCA Consensus and mining mechanism.
Released the Alpha version of our client SDK and wallet, which will help more developers build dApps using NKN’s network .

What’s beyond Lemur?

The release of the Lemur demonstrates that NKN team have accomplished a key milestone as planned, as well as entering into the next development phase towards testnet v0.5 Koala. This release builds a solid foundation and bodes well for on-time launch of our mainnet during first half of 2019.

With this Lemur release, we opened up the door for community members to run their own full nodes, join the NKN testnet, and start experimental mining. Decentralization is both in the spirit and practice of NKN project. We will publish the experimental mining guidance in the next few days as well.

In addition, we will publish our official performance testing results during the next weeks and months. This is commonly used for many blockchain projects and will help put a “NKN dot” on the scalability map, and showcase NKN’s contribution to advance the blockchain technology in general.

Pleases follow up on our official channels to receive the latest updates!

For further details regarding V0.3 Lemur release:

Lemur overview and features:

NKN is a unique public blockchain designed to handle network data transmission. In this release, we have not only strengthened the basic functions of our blockchain system, but have added the ability to support token transfer. This means that an NKN node can now receive a relay fee by forwarding data to the sender.
The Lemur release supports large-scale node configurations and was developed to support the deployment of thousands of nodes with a single click. Currently, our testnet features a large scale deployment of Lemur on Google Cloud. In addition, this release includes compilation script refactoring to support more compilation option as well as the optimization of the asset data storage format so that asset information is distributed in different blocks for better database performance.
Updates to transaction and block information in NKN blockchain include:

a. Adding timeout reselection function when block producer is offline

b. Performing command line optimization

c. Including error handling of nknc program

d. Parameter format change of nknd program

e. Block synchronization pool optimization

f. Support to receive and count the number of votes of different blocks of the same height

g.Node synchronization state and the processing flow for different states of the node increase

4. PoR mechanism updates:

a. Signature chain structure is upgraded

b. Relay node can set whether to participate in mining or not

5. Updates in the DDTN design include:

a. optimization of Chord DHT network neighbor nodes

b. Code optimization to supported large-scale deployment NKN nodes

c. Added JSON-RPC permission access interface was implemented

d. Support for seed node list function was supported

e. New node join could be specified

f. added support for IPv6 node connections

6. The basic functionality for MOCA consensus is now complete and we have also added the validation of block producers in the Lemur version as well. This release also includes:

a. Block synchronization based on neighbor voting,

b. Consensus code optimization

c. Mining and the block signature functions modularized

d. Consensus voting process uses dynamic neighbors to improve security

Release notes for V0.3 Lemur

The table below provides a comparison of the new features and performance enhancements between V0.1 Firefox and V0.3 Lemur releases: