July 1st, 2019, San Francisco
Overview
After more than 1 year of hard work, today we are thrilled to announce the launch of NKN’s mainnet Narwhal. We set out to build the world’s largest permissionless public blockchain network and achieved this goal at 13,000 full consensus nodes already during testnet and surpassing Bitcoin and Ethereum. Today, we will make it official and intend to scale it to millions if not trillions of nodes so we have a solid foundation to commercialize our flagship products as well as supporting our partner’s applications.
NKN is a fully featured blockchain system that supports payments, transactions, and digital assets. The NKN blockchain also has a unique specialization: a better communication network that supports the needs of modern applications that everyone uses in their daily lives. Be it chat and instant messaging, video streaming and web browsing, smart home and smart cities, we want to be that indispensable software foundation.
Just providing a platform or foundation is not enough, so we built two flagship products: New Kind of CDN (nCDN) and Decentralized Pub/Sub and messaging. We are running these value added micro services on existing NKN mining nodes, and have begun to trial commercial traffic with tier-1 enterprise customers. With these two flagship products, we intent to show developers that building on top of NKN is not only technically superior, but also commercially successful.
In crypto world, technology alone is not enough. An innovative economic model is crucial to the success of any crypto projects. Thus we are proposing enhancements that will bring more value to token holder, miners, and users. And we intend to use the New Kind of Proposal (NKP) community process to move these forward during the next 3 months.
Roadmap Beyond Mainnet:
Mainnet is not an end point in our development, but rather a starting point for building the biggest blockchain system and most decentralized communication network.
- Day 1: July 1st, 2019
- Phase 1: Security and stability, 1-3 months
- Steadily and gradually ramp up of nodes
- Security audit and verification
- Cooperate with all official exchanges for native token integration
- ERC-20 token will remain the tradable asset on exchanges
- Swap between mainnet and ERC-20 tokens is disabled
- Temporary limitations during this phase: transaction rate will be limited, force update will be enabled, default log level will be INFO
- Phase 2: General availability and tokenomics boost; after Phase 1
- Enable mainnet and ERC-20 token swap: exchanges, wallet, online web tool
- Economic model enhancements
- Commercialization of flagship products: fiat income and token utility
- June 2020: NKN 2.0
- More features based on the feedback from users and developers
- Further security, scalability and performance enhancements
- Large open ecosystem of 3rd party micro-services running on top of NKN
Summary
As we mentioned earlier, the mainnet launch is just a starting point. We aspire to build the world’s largest public blockchain and decentralized blockchain network, and you can participate in this new ecosystem in many ways:
- “Users” can contribute unused bandwidth to NKN as miners and earn tokens
- “Developer” can use the NKN communication network and protocol to develop the ”real” dynamic decentralized application
- “Enterprises” can cooperate with NKN to speed up website performance, provide online video streaming with low latency and cost, and overall improve customer satisfaction
- “Token holders” can trade NKN token on exchanges (Huobi Pro, Bittrex International, Upbit, gate.io and IDEX
Appendices:
Technical release notes and miner guide (English).