Highlights
- MainNet v1.1.7-beta Release
- April Video AMA with NKN Core Team
- The Daily Chain – NKN 2020 with Co-Founder Zheng “Bruce” Li
- Messaging Application Survey
- nLearning new articles: “Encrypted Messaging”, “Is WhatsApp safe?”
- Mentions: Wolfram’s Physics Project, NKN and Distributed Computing
Mainnet technical development updates
Latest Mainnet Stats May 7, 2020:
- 🌐 37 countries & regions
- 🏭 168 ISPs or cloud providers
- 💻 19,731 full consensus nodes
NKN MainNet v1.1.7-beta Release
On April 27th, NKN released MainNet v1.1.7-beta. This version fixes potential security problems found during the ongoing security audit. In addition, the release introduces new optimizations as well as greatly reduced RAM usage under high throughput relay. More changes can be found in the change notes below.
Because new security mechanisms and protocols are introduced, old versions will no longer be able to produce valid signature chains (and earn mining rewards) after block height 1,200,000. Please upgrade as soon as possible to avoid potential mining rewards loss!
Security
- Avoid the same sigchain to be backtracked multiple times
- Ignore vote with invalid height in persist finish state
- Add rate limiting for RPC requests and sync block msg
- Migrate sigchain sigAlgo from hash to signature
Consensus
- Add minimal number of neighbor samples to help bootstrap network
- Fix syncing node election starts later than persist nodes
Network
- Reduce message id cache RAM usage
- Add pin sigchain protocol to reduce relay RAM usage (stage 1/2)
- Add pin src sigchain logic to reduce first relay node RAM usage
RPC
- Add https json rpc address in getws[s]addr response
nknc
- Fix nknc create wallet might print wrong address
Code Quality
- Remove legacy crypto big int code from old ECDSA signature
- Fix gofmt, ineffassign, misspell warnings
The latest stable release for mainnet is v1.1.7-beta
(https://github.com/nknorg/nkn/releases )
April Video AMA with NKN Core Team
On April 16th, NKN hosted a live April AMA following the recent announcement of our commercial contract with iQIYI to advance technical innovation for video content delivery. The AMA not only covered our collaboration with iQIYI, but also answered questions from the community about exchange plans, products, advisors, partners, and technology as well.
If you missed the live stream, check out the video available on our YouTube channel, or read the Q&A highlights on the NKN forum.
The Daily Chain – NKN 2020 with Co-Founder Zheng “Bruce” Li
The Daily Chain recently did an email interview with NKN Co-Founder, Bruce Li, to talk about the latest updates from NKN. The article, which was published on April 21st, provides highlights of NKN developments in 2020 so far.
The article also features insights from Bruce on these developments as well as the future of NKN for the remainder of 2020. For more information, read the article here.
Messaging Application Survey
From April 25-29th, NKN conducted a messaging application survey in order to understand how our community is using these applications. More importantly, what features and capabilities are critical and what is missing from today’s messaging applications. We also offered an NKN token reward to 3 lucky winners who participated in the survey.
We asked and you delivered with 100 responses! We are truly grateful for your feedback and we will be adding your input into our own nMobile secure messaging application, which is available for Android today and iOS soon.
Highlights from the Survey:
- You value both function (Direct, group, multimedia) and usability (reaction, typing indicator, read receipt, multi-platform)
- Voice is still king, followed by video chat and conference calls
- Security and privacy is very high on your minds
- Most use Telegram, second by WhatsApp
- You believe Telegram is most secure, followed by Signal
The full article is available on the official NKN blog here.
Mentions: Wolfram’s Physics Project, NKN and Distributed Computing
During the April 22nd working session of Dr. Stephen Wolfram’s new Physics Project: a search for the fundamental theory of physics, NKN was cited as an example of distributed computing that uses cellular automata in its consensus algorithm. Dr Wolfram is not only a technical advisor for NKN, but his book New Kind of Science was an inspiration in building a New Kind of Network (NKN) based on simple programs known as cellular automata for a truly decentralized and horizontally scalable data transmission network and novel blockchain. We are excited to be able to use our computing power to support Wolfram’s Physics Project.
nLearning new articles: “Encrypted Messaging”, “Is WhatsApp safe?”
Have you had a chance to check out the NKN Official Blog recently? We add new content every week so check back often. This past few weeks we added 2 new posts that focus on messaging applications that you might use everyday. The first is “Encrypted Messaging: What is it and Why You Should Use It”, which takes a look at the security features available on many popular messaging applications including NKN’s D-Chat and gives you some tips on what you can do to keep yourself secure. The next article is “Is WhatsApp Safe? Here’s What You Need to Know” which provides an in-depth look at WhatsApp and its security vulnerabilities. The article provides steps to make your use of WhatsApp more secure as well provides alternative messaging apps that are available as well.
Check out these, and other informative articles on the nLearning section of the NKN Official Blog!
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.
Email: contact@nkn.org
Telegram: https://t.me/nknorg
Twitter: https://twitter.com/NKN_ORG
Forum: https://forum.nkn.org
Medium: https://medium.com/nknetwork
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nknetwork/
Github: https://github.com/nknorg
Discord: https://discord.gg/yVCWmkC
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/c/NKNORG