All,
In case you missed last week’s April NKN Core Team AMA, please find Q&A highlights from our discussion below:
Are there some progress on trading mainnet tokens on exchanges?
Not Yet, The reason is that we are taking the security audit seriously. We are working with one of the most competent security audit companies, which is going through all the source code looking for deeper problems. The audit is going well and a majority of the code has been audited and all the security flaws found so far have been fixed which you can find in the pull requests on our github. However, we are still looking at other things like peripheral code which might take a bit more time. However, once that is done we will move to exchanges and start Mainnet integration. At the end of the day, conducting a thorough security audit is safer for our community, exchanges, and everybody.
Tell us some more about the commercial client software. Is it partially closed source? Will it use the nkn tokens as the open source one? Can everyone run commercial client software?, I mean nodes for those later on or are there basic requirements, or is this related to tuna?
NKN Commercial is partially closed source because some of the services we run use commercial software which is not open source. The NKN Commercial fetches a list of services which include applications such as NKN main node, TUNA, nCDN, or even iQIYi’s CDN that are available and will manage those services on the NKN platform. NKN main node and TUNA are entirely open source. Since by default, it uses NKN main node (nknd) with mining, it does use nkn tokens. NKN commercial is available to anyone that would like to run it and has the same hardware requirements as the open source version.
How much percentage does nkn charge from the payment of the client, to keep the business running?
If we want to be successful, we need to have a healthy mining ecosystem. Therefore, NKN cannot act as many centralized systems do, which take a large share of the profit. We intend to share the vast majority of the revenue from our customers like iQIYi with the miners and we will keep a small percentage for operations. We receive payment from customers in local fiat, and will use those funds to convert to tokens that will be paid out to miners. This will also improve the velocity of tokens and will be healthy for the token ecosystem as well.
When do you guys go live with Baidu? Will Baidu do a joint press release with you?
Baidu is not involved. We have signed a contract with the video streaming platform iQIYi, which although has investments from Baidu, is a separate company. In order to release the news about our commercial relationship with iQIYi it must be coordinated and approved by iQIYi. Typically large companies do not want to do a joint press release, however, what we have published is approved by iQIYi.
Do you have a timescale for when iQIYI content will actually be moved through the network? And will it mostly be making use of the China Mobile edge-nodes?
iQIYi content has been flowing through our nodes since last year. However, since we signed the contract about a week ago, we are now working to ramp up capacity to meet demand. For the first phase, the demand is for nodes in China only. The reason is that in order to achieve the performance needed, the nodes need to be in proximity to iQIYi’s subscribers in China. We intend to ramp up quickly. The good news is that there is no upper limit in the amount of capacity that iQIYi needs, therefore, we expect to take full advantage of all the resources we have available to help meet the demand. We will use China Mobile edge-nodes in certain areas where there is less community coverage. We prefer that a majority of the nodes come from the community to help maintain a more decentralized infrastructure.
How is NKN different from Theta Network? When will we be seeing full integration of NKN to iQIYi?
We have a good relationship with Theta. Theta offers both Slivr.tv, which is like Twitch or YouTubeLive featuring live streamed crowdsourced content, and Theta Labs, which is the infrastructure side focusing on how to distribute that content effectively. They have a very focused approach to both incentivizing and distributing user generated live streaming content which is more of a consumer play. For NKN, we are focused on the network infrastructure which not only includes video delivery but also messaging, file transfer, proxy, web acceleration and more.
Full integration with iQIYi is already happening. Since we already finished the commercial trial, we know how to integrate and deploy as well as maintain accounting and payments with iQIYi. It’s now a matter of connecting those systems with iQIYi and verify everything is working on a larger scale. It will take a month to a month and a half to go through the whole payment cycle and verify everything is working before we ramp up.
We’ve spoken about NKN’s funding and how long the business is covered for previously, but now with NETNIC and recent iQiyi signed, can you comment on the company’s cash flow and how things are processing commercially?
NKN.org is the open source foundation which is funded by the money we raised previously by token sale. That will last 2-3 years based on our current headcount. This foundation will remain independent focused on building a vibrant open source community for NKN. We also have the commercial side, or for-profit entity, which will be separate from the foundation. It’s still early, but with examples like our commercial contract with iQIYi, we can see that we have good product/market fit for the commercial organization. The good news is that the commercial entity may allow us to grow and hire more developers and business development resources to help strengthen our product portfolio and gain more customers.
Do you have other possible business deals in the making that you cannot talk about? Without saying much could you estimate them with small, medium, or large (iqiyi)?
We are currently focused on iQIYi and making sure we are providing excellent service before we begin to approach other large video service providers. We are also looking at gaming as another potential customer segment for content delivery to help distribute game packs, and other software updates. In addition, we have already commercially deployed our dataRide secure remote access to a Network Attached Storage (NAS) vendor and will be looking to expand this solution to other NAS vendors as well as Security Camera vendors as well. However, this is still a bit early. We are also working with larger cable companies in the US and EU, but just as with iQIYi, these prospects will take some time.
How about ipv6 support for the nodes, available ipv4 numbers are getting less and less, google says for search requests around 30% ipv6 (despite the question, was it a real request or just bots). Other cdn companies are offering ipv6 support. Do you see a need for it and if so what about the effort of implementation into the nkn ecosystem?
It’s trivial to enable ipv6 from the technical side. The real issue is the compatibility side. If a node chooses to only provide an ipv6 address, then other ipv4 nodes will not be able to connect to it since these are 2 incompatible protocols. Since ipv6 is still not a large percentage of internet traffic, this may not be optimal. Ideally, providing ipv6 support would be most beneficial when almost all of the nodes (99%) in the network can offer ipv6 addresses. This is not the case today.
Will NKN nodes ever be available on mobile?
It’s not difficult to make an NKN node run on a mobile device. However, there are several issues in doing so. First of all, running a node would drain the battery much more quickly since the application would need to continue to run in the background. In addition, mobile operators apply security firewalls and other protections on the network side to protect mobile devices that prevent open ports which are needed for incoming connections to NKN nodes. Therefore, it’s not practical to run an NKN node on mobile at this time.
I tried out nftp.nkn.org with a friend, it is awesome. I can seen an app called nDrop or something where you just leave it running on your home PC and whenever you want to drop yourself a file from elsewhere you just use nDrop. Will we see an online video game running purely on NKN?
The nDrop you mentioned would not be hard to make. The source code for nftp.nkn.org is available on github. As long as you use our SDK which is available on multiple platforms you just need to make a nice UI. For example, using the open source Filezilla as the user interface, while replacing the communication stack with NKN. That would be a super nice nDrop. It would be great to see someone from the community give it a try! And we can offer a bounty for that.
In terms of gaming, we had the Space Cats multiplayer game that uses NKN for communication, however, we have not had the resources to update and maintain it. If someone from the community would like to help us update this game, the code is available on github. We also demonstrated the realtime multiplayer T-REX-runner game which uses NKN as well. We would like to see more games developed on NKN, and would encourage our community to develop more games on the platform.
Will there be several NKN networks or only a single large one?
Publicly, only a single large one. However, privately, there could be many as you would like. This is very similar to other blockchain projects like Ethereum.
Hossein Moiin’s name was dropped very quickly last year, with no other official name-drop since. Could you give us an update with regards to your business advisor team that was spoken of in 2019
In addition to Hossein Moiin we also have Ray, Michael, and soon to be others. These are industry veterans who advise us in different domains such as CDN and SaaS as well as strategy and other areas of interest to NKN. Industry veterans see the value in what we are doing and are eager to help us to move forward.
Has NKN faced any difficulties with Chinese Regulation due to the Chinese crackdown on cryptocurrencies?
We don’t promote NKN as a cryptocurrency so much in China. Our China team has been promoting our technology achievements as well as our commercial success with iQIYi, NETNIC, and China Mobile. At the end of the day, NKN.org is a Singapore Foundation and our teams in China and the US are software development organizations. Therefore, we have not had any issues in China. The main issues seen with the crackdown in China is related to organizations that are using cryptocurrency for illegal fundraising or fraud. We have been very careful with our legal compliance.
Is there any synergies between yourselves and Theta that you guys could team up on? The reason I ask is that, with your clients like IQiyi, and theirs like Samsung? together you could become a very dominant force.
We know the team at Theta and discuss with them regularly. If we find an opportunity where Theta and NKN together provides a better solution, we would definitely do it. We are not competing and therefore would certainly be open to collaboration opportunities.
Would ipv6 mean a second nkn network for only ipv6, because there wont be no direct connection to ipv4, or will there be some interconnection between nodes that support ipv4 and ipv6 to relay packages in between. I mean ipv6 is way more simple regarding the possible number of nodes is it not?
There are 2 ways for an ipv4 node and an ipv6 node to communicate. The first is to have a node that has both an ipv4 and an ipv6 address. This is likely the first step in integrating an environment that supports both types of addresses. There is also a method that maps every ipv4 address to an ipv6 address and uses a translation or relay to convert the address. With many different methods there would still be just one NKN network. Again, it would make sense to consider these alternatives once ipv6 has a larger market share.
NKN will one day be running Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, YouTube and of course GOOGLE. NKN is an actual project with real world results and adoption. Why does the price not reflect the amazing progress you guys are making? When Coinbase?
There are lots of things that affect the token price. The overall market is one of the biggest factors. Everything being equal, many token projects have very concentrated ownership. NKN does not. We have unlocked nearly all our tokens and if you look at our token distribution it is very widely distributed. Therefore, there are very few big players owning lots of tokens. Yes, the foundation and team do have lots of tokens but you can see that these tokens are locked and nobody is moving them. The price of other tokens may see spikes due to market manipulation and you can see from our token distribution we do not do that. The growth in our token price may be modest but it is organic which is what we prefer.
Regarding Coinbase, we would love to be on Coinbase, however, they have not been listing many new coins recently but I do believe they are one of the most reputable exchanges with access to large US investors and crypto funds. We will definitely keep on trying but it will take some time.