NKN Bi-weekly Report: January 15–28, 2019

Posted on 1월 29, 2019

Highlights

Releases V0.7 Meerkat, the final testnet, 2 weeks ahead of schedule
NEP-5 to ERC-20 token swap updates: it’s time to act
Testnet organically grows to more than 5,000 nodes
Community Developers upgrades nknX.org to v0.3.0, adding notification
Wins Best Partners award at ABC Blockchain Community
Releases 3 new Videos (consensus tech talk, running node on cloud)
Community releases Mining FAQ

R&D highlights

NKN Releases V0.7 Meerkat

NKN was excited to announce the early release of v0.7 Meerkat on January 18th, 2 weeks ahead of schedule. Meerkat is the final testnet release and marks a significant milestone for the NKN project. The release includes a full featured testnet with complete implementation, strong security and enhanced performance, and a SDK.

Release Highlights:

MOCA Consensus module was re-written for better security against attacks as well as greater improved stability
Enhanced network layer which includes resistance to malicious and spam messaging, 70x more efficient block/transaction broadcasting, and latency-based proximity routing to achieve up to 100% faster relay messaging
Block synchronization module rewritten to include local BFT-level robustness against malicious and faulty neighbors as well as a 10x faster block synchronization
New Pub/sub feature used to discover and subscribe to useful application services running on top of the NKN platform
New Golang SDK with both client and wallet implementation
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.

For more details on what is included in v0.7 Meerkat, check out our blog post:

https://medium.com/nknetwork/releasing-meerkat-nkns-final-testnet-d79be255f460

We have also released three subsequent bug-fix and performance enhancing sub-releases. The newest version v0.7.3-alpha has quite a few significant improvements:

Memory usage is greatly reduced (<200–300MB) and will not grow over time, so it can be run stability on smaller and cheaper devices with less resources.
Bandwidth usage is further reduced by 50% ~ 80% so it saves you money!
Automatic fork detection and rollback, to avoid chain re-sync in most cases.

The latest new and stable version is here: https://github.com/nknorg/nkn/releases

Github source code development progress

NKN testnet code development progress over the last two weeks is mainly reflected in nkn, nnet, nkn-sdk-go, nkn-client-js, nkn-wallet-js, nkn-mining repositories and different branches. There is a significant surge due to the merge of new consensus implementation and many other improvements from Meerkat.

The latest stable release: v0.7.3 was released on January 18th, 2019.

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

NKN Testnet v0.7.3-alpha

Reduce memory usage and (most importantly) fix memory leak
Reduce bandwidth usage by doubling the stabilize interval
Automatic fork detection and rollback
A few other bug fix

NKN Mining — v0.0.10

Bug Fix: showing wrong information when downloading the nknd
Bug Fix: mining status was setted to an invalid value if downloading nknd failed

NEP-5 to ERC-20 token swap updates

Here is the latest token swap stats as of January 28th, 2018: so far 210,542,291 tokens have been swapped from NEP-5 to ERC-20, which represents about 60% of total circulating supply (350M). We are working with our existing exchanges to push that number towards 75%. So we encourage you to swap your tokens for better liquidity in the future.

The token swap program that was announced on January 3rd continues as our community has begun swapping their NEP-5 tokens to ERC-20 based tokens. This voluntary program is being offered to enable improved liquidity as well as leverage the large ecosystem built by Ethereum. If you haven’t done so already, please swap your tokens today!

If your tokens are on gate.io, your tokens will be swapped automatically on their respective platforms. Official announcement from gate.io can be found here: https://www.gate.io/article/16733

For all others, NKN is offering an official NKN web-based tool to swap your NEP-5 tokens for ERC-20 tokens at https://swap.nkn.org/.

For instructions and more information check out our medium posts and YouTube video to assist you with your token swap:

Token Swap Announcement: https://medium.com/nknetwork/nkn-token-swap-nep-5-to-erc-20-c476d064718e

Guide: NKN’s official token swap web tool

https://medium.com/nknetwork/guide-nkns-official-token-swap-web-tool-375c5c48a87a

YouTube Video: NKN Token Swap: NEP-5 to ERC-20

https://youtu.be/H0hr9m-ry54

Public testnet organically grows to more than 5,000 nodes

NKN’s public testnet has grown to over 5,000 nodes across more than 40 different countries. This a significant achievement in no small part to the strong support from our community. Of these nodes, only 114 are being seeded by NKN. The remainder are being hosted by our community.

What makes this even more special is the fact that NKN is more decentralized than ever before. Back in November 2018, we had reached a similar milestone with the help of big miners in our community that were running 1,000+ nodes at a time in datacenters. However, this time, we have more community members running nodes across a great number of countries than ever before.

We sincerely thank everyone who is running NKN nodes in our testnet and helping our project build one of the largest public blockchain networks available anywhere (only behind Bitcoin and Ethereum at the moment).

https://www.nkn.org/#/miner

https://testnet.nkn.org/

Community developers upgrade nknX.org to v0.3.0

On January 18th, our community developers ChrisT and lightmyfire announced that nknX has been successfully updated to version 0.3.0! Also thanks to all our community members for translating into 7 languages. Here are the changelogs:

Bug fixes:
– tables are now scrollable for better handling on mobile devices
– pagination on single address pages are now working correct

Features:
– onPage notifications: nknX now shows an alert if your nodes go offline, get stucked or are outdated
– eMail notifications: you can now enable eMail notifications in your profile. In addition to the onPage notifications you will also receive them via eMail
– map-tracing: view how packets are relayed through the NKN network in the new world map
– you can now create a paper wallet from your wallet file or private key
– you can now restore your wallet file from your private key
– praise the community! Check out our translators in the footer-link

You can find more here: https://nknx.org

NKN wins Best Partners Award at ABC Blockchain Community

On January 26th, NKN was honored with a Best Partner Award by the ABC Blockchain Community in San Mateo, CA. NKN was recognized together with Binance Labs and Quarkchain in collaborating with ABC Blockchain on a number of different events throughout 2018 including the Blockchain Awakens Hackathon in August, and Tech Talks. We look forward to continuing to collaborate with ABC Blockchain in 2019.

ABC (Recursive synonym for ABC Blockchain Community) was founded by a group of Google engineers and soon evolved into a technical community for engineers, researchers, investors, entrepreneurs, and other blockchain enthusiasts to collaborate on blockchain technology advancement.

https://www.abcer.world/

NKN Releases 3 new Videos

NKN has released 3 new videos on its YouTube Channel. The first features CTO Dr. Yilun Zhang presenting a Tech Talk at the Blockchain Connect Conference in San Francisco where he shares his insights on on how to achieve Mullion-node consensus. The second video showcases NKN’s Technology as the team engages with the attendees at Blockchain Connect 2019. Finally, the latest video which was released on January 23rd is a tutorial showing how you can setup an NKN node on Digital Ocean and start earning rewards.

Please check out these videos and subscribe to our YouTube Channel here:

http://www.youtube.com/c/NKNORG

NKN Tech Talk: Million-node consensus with Dr. Yilun Zhang

https://youtu.be/a5eHyDuKOoo

NKN Showcases Technology at Blockchain Connect 2019

https://youtu.be/uP9covwS4Yw

Setup NKN on Digital Ocean

https://youtu.be/NEoshg_jf4I

Community publishes consolidated mining FAQ

On January 24th, NKN community member Christian Busch published a comprehensive FAQ for all things NKN mining. Included are links to tutorials on installing NKN nodes on almost any platform from DigitalOcean to a raspberry pi. The faq also includes useful information to help monitor nodes, update software, maintain your wallet, and much more.

This mining FAQ promises to be actively updated, so make sure to follow the latest here:

https://medium.com/nknetwork/nkn-mining-faq-7182f01fb5b4

Upcoming events

Lunar New Year 2019

We would like to take this opportunity to wish everyone a happy lunar new year. During February 4–11th, 2019, most of our NKN team in Beijing office will be spending time with their family and friends. Our California office is working as usual. As such, we may be a bit slower in responding to your inquiries during this period. However, rest assured that we have a contingency plan and will be monitoring our testnet and community boards throughout the holiday.

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.