NKN is an independent project that need to revamp the plumbing of both network layer and consensus layer. Therefore it is not built on top of NEO, ETH or other existing public blockchain. NKN will have its own public chain to record and clear transactions for network connectivity and data transmission. There are a few reasons for that:
- Efficiency of verifying transaction: a data communication network on a global scale will generate large amount of transactions in real time, whether it is session based or packet based. We have not found an existing blockchain system to handle that.
- Number of nodes to reach consensus: we are talking about at least millions and more likely billions of nodes reaching consensus. In contrast, Bitcoin and Ethereum have a few thousands nodes. We need to do some hard work at the foundation of blockchain consensus algorithm to make it work. Cellular Automata is one of the concept we are leveraging.
Overall, we want to have more nodes to join the NKN network, both for increasing network capacity, as well as improve stability and attack resistance. And the tokenization of transmission capacity will incentivize such behavior. So the dynamic network routing and underlying blockchain consensus algorithm has a symbiotic relationship. Both need to be re-architected, redesigned and rewritten to optimize the sum of two.