2019 has been a coming of age year for NKN. Unfazed by the crypto winter of 2018, the NKN team and community hunkered down with true grits and doubled down on building out the largest blockchain network in the world for network sharing.
We filled the year with major achievements including the launch of Mainnet 1.0, new Communication as a Service (CaaS) solutions including nCDN, commercial trials and contracts with enterprise customers like NETNIC and China Mobile, and new exchanges including Binance, Huobi, Bittrex Global, and Upbit. There were hopes, anxieties, setbacks, moments of triumph and true joy.
As such, we wanted to take a minute and share some of the highlights of the year as well as a glimpse into our plans for 2020 as well.
Technology and Products
This year brought technology advancements, network growth, and new products for NKN.
Starting with NKN’s public testnet, the network doubled in size from 5,000 nodes in January to more than 10,000 nodes by April. This rapid growth can be attributed in part to the introduction of the super easy 1-click NKN Full Node deployment across three leading cloud platforms: DigitalOcean, Amazon Web Service, and Google Cloud. In addition, NKN was not only a launch partner for DigitalOcean’s 1-click Marketplace, but was among the most deployed applications available at launch.
On July 1st, NKN launched Mainnet v1.0 Narwhal, a pivotal moment culminating in more than a year of development and testing to bring NKN to production quality and mass adoption. With Mainnet, the NKN network quickly grew to 20,000 nodes across more than 40 countries worldwide. This achievement makes NKN the largest shared network globally.
Following our Mainnet launch, we shared roadmap plans toward NKN 2.0 with a focus on building applications on the NKN network platform. This new roadmap introduced NKN’s Communication as a Service (CaaS) application suite which includes:
- dChat — Secure person to person and group messaging service, which can be used for IoT, machine-human and machine-machine communication as well
- nCDN — Crowd-sourced content delivery network with many Points of Presence (PoPs) for best performance and cost.
- nFTP — Secure and direct, high throughput file transfer
- nVPN — Crowd-sourced enterprise VPN with built in micropayment channel
- nShell — Securely manage remote servers and machines
Commercialization
2019 was also the year that NKN gained early commercial traction with new products. In October, NKN signed an agreement with NETNIC to offer nCDN for NETNIC’s 100,000 enterprise customers.
We also found commercial success with nFTP, with a popular Network Attached Storage (NAS) vendor, who is using nFTP to deliver photos, videos, and other files from users’ home NAS unit to their mobile application. To date, this solution has been rolled out to more than 15,000 NAS customers globally.
In December, we scored another major commercial win! NKN signed an agreement with a division of China Mobile in southern China to collaborate in strategic areas including cloud computing, network, and blockchain. In addition, NKN will be using China Mobile Edge Servers and underlying infrastructure to deploy NKN applications such as nCDN and nFTP for enterprise customers.
Token and Exchanges
NKN token adoption expanded in 2020 with listings on major exchanges including Bittrex Global, Upbit, IDEX, Houbi, and the highly requested Binance. We won the listing on the two largest exchanges, Huobi and Binance, by popular community vote. And we won by a large margin and in a convincing fashion, riding on the strong support of not only the NKN community but also the exchange’s own user base. There are now more liquidity options for NKN than ever before.
A Looking Ahead
We have only just begun. 2019 laid the groundwork for our success in the coming years. We now have the largest shared network globally (yes bigger than Bitcoin or Ethereum), and we plan to capitalize on our Communication as a Service suite of solution in 2020. In fact, we have already seen promising early customer traction with nCDN and nFTP and we will strive to rapidly ramp up these existing and upcoming solutions to many more customers in 2020. Maybe 2020 will become the year that NKN begins to fulfill its full potential.
Community
One more thing… NKN would not be where we are today without the strong support of our community. Over the course of the year, we have seen community members step up to develop applications such as NKNx and d-Chat, offer translations and artwork, help other users on our forums, and vote in our campaigns. We are truly blessed to have such a rich and dedicated community to support our project.
Thank You and we cannot wait for an even brighter 2020!
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.
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