As you may have already known NKN is participating in Binance Community Coin of the Month Competition Round 8 right now. First of all, we would like to thanks to Binance for shortlisting us together with 4 other high quality projects out of a large amount of applications. Binance has very strict rules that no financial incentives (including cash and tokens) shall be offered by the project for voting. So the projects have to rely on the support of community to vote. This is what projects with active community and loyal supporters such as NKN are expecting.

It’s a perfect timing for NKN to participate in the voting competition. NKN is growing rapidly now. Team in the U.S. and China are achieving our goal of creating a decentralized data transmission network and scalable public chain step by step. Our community is also expanding very fast, attracting more and more people who align with our vision and would like to contribute to the project. The voting competition is a great opportunity for us to be exposed to more supporters and investors.

It was a pity that NKN did not participate in the last voting competition as we were preparing for the testnet launch. So this time our community were super excited when round 8’s final candidates were announced. They transformed their accumulated energy into action and immediately started voting whenever possible. As a result, we had a significant early lead in terms of both number of voters and votes. However, at some point, there are increasing irregularities in voting where vote manipulations have been reported by Crypto enthusiasts around the world. When these tactics were exposed, the entities behind these irregularities started a large scale smear campaign. Some of them even pretend to be NKN project and buy votes for NKN, thus collecting so-called evidence.

The community and team are extremely irritated, and we were faced with a dilemma. How can we compete fairly if the rules are not followed and this kind of systematic manipulation is not stopped? Just relying on community, family and friends, we might be at a significant disadvantage and handicapped. We do have the resource and power to use the same tactics, and maybe we could “win” this battle by doing so, but what kind of “success” can it bring to NKN? More capital, more investors, more brand awareness or future opportunity?

We have been brooding over this question for long and hard hours, and eventually it all boils down to the core question “What does NKN want to achieve?” We have sufficient funding for some time. The reason we started NKN is to build a decentralized data transmission network shared and contributed by everyone, dramatically improve scalability of blockchain consensus, and eventually makes the Internet better. This goal is hard to achieve, but it is the belief that propels me to leave a successful blockchain company to start this very hard project, focusing on research and development in an environment full of shortcuts and “easy money”: we open sourced our code and live testnet preview ahead of schedule, and we are well on our way to the next release of a much larger scale live testnet. We always believe that only teams holding strong belief can be successful in the long run.

It is significantly crucial for NKN team to focus on solving technical challenges. Just like Ethereum tokenizes decentralized computing and IPFS/Filecoin incentivize decentralized and shared storage, NKN intends to build a brand new public chain to tokenize network connectivity and transmission capacity, so the new Internet can be built, shared, and owned by the community.Meanwhile, we need to strengthen our business and ecosystem development, and continue to expand our community. The overwhelming solidarity and support from our global community makes us deeply humbled and moved. Thank you all, supporters of NKN, you are truly amazing. We will treasure the golden age of blockchain industry and build something that we will be proud of and never regret, forever.

So in the end we decided to stick to our guns, strictly follow the rules, and really try to compete by winning the heart and support of community, family, and friends. This way, we will attract the true believers and supporters. We believe this choice aligns with our initial goal, and is the very best choice for the project to succeed in the long run. Now it has come to the last stage of the voting competition, let’s stick to the rules and respect other projects. We truly hope the best community wins the battle.

Yours sincerely,

Yanbo Li & Bruce Li

Founders, NKN

July 28th, 2018