NKN Bi-weekly Report September 7–22, 2018

Community News
#1

Unleash public testnet and community

NKN Newsletter

Highlights

Since we have launched our public testnet at the end of August, we have won enthusiastic support from our community in testing and expanding the NKN testnet. At one point we had over 1,500 NKN nodes running globally , of which only 233 nodes were hosted by the NKN Project Team. Further, the scale and variety of nodes helped our development team to quickly fix bugs and add features: cranking out 51 pull requests on our github within 30 days of public testnet launch. These results give us a lot of confidence in launching a high quality mainnet and achieving ambitious scalability results, which will position us on the top right quadrant of public blockchain scalability map.

In addition, our community members have consistently surprised us in creating beautiful software, useful tools and documentation for NKN . To name a few: several ingeniously small New Kind of Miner solutions built on Raspberry Pi, a Miner Dashboard webapp, a Discord bot connected to NKN testnet, a New Kind of Wallet for NKN, and the list goes on. Our Discord channel is buzzing with lots of excitement, and people are having fun!

We have several high profile events coming up in October , which will become one of the most exciting months for NKN project. So come visit us during San Francisco Blockchain Week, TIP Summit in London, and TC3 Summit in Silicon Valley!

Rapid and significant R&D progress in core node software for Public Testnet

Github source code development progress

NKN testnet code development progress is mainly reflected in the following code repositories over the last 30 days since Lemur release: nkn, nkn-client-js, nkn-wallet-js, nkn-mining.

NKN Github activity since Lemur release

First, we can see that the nkn core repository is continuously updated at a very rapid pace, 9 releases in 30 days !

NKN Testnet v0.3.9-alpha

  • Enhance network stability.

NKN Testnet v0.3.8-alpha

  • Compatible to signature chain produced by nodes prior to v0.3.7.

NKN Testnet v0.3.7-alpha

  • Add chord id to each sigchain element and use it to check block proposer. This prevents multiple nodes sharing the same wallet from proposing multiple blocks;
  • Fix JASON API server CORS not working.

NKN Testnet v0.3.6-alpha

  • Fix the bugs that will cause Chord topology not correct or even crash;
  • Fix the bugs that will cause node to be deadlocked;
  • Fix the bugs that will open too many connections;
  • Fix the bugs that will make node stuck in sync state;
  • Tons of minor bug fix and improvements.

NKN Testnet v0.3.5-alpha

  • bug fixes for chord networking, such as deadlock and concurrent access;
  • bug fixes for transaction relay;
  • unify node ID to chord ID.

NKN Testnet v0.3.4-alpha

  • Add timeout for Chord inbound connections to avoid port leaking;
  • Broadcast transactions to all neighbors rather than persistfinished.

NKN Testnet v0.3.3-alpha

Fix the rare bug that nil pointer error will crash the node in FindSuccessors.

NKN Testnet v0.3.2-alpha

  • Fix received connection not closing bug;
  • Handle all nodes restart logic, when no sigchain in system the block proposer will be changed based on timeout.

NKN Testnet v0.3.1-alpha

  • Limit the max number of concurrent goroutines to prevent uncontrolled memory usage;
  • Fix incoming tcp connection not closed to prevent tcp port leaking;
  • A few other bug fixes.

Second, nkn-client-js repository has been updated with an optimized implementation of the JavaScript NKN client. The client enables sending and receiving data between any NKN clients without setting up a server. The major updates are:

  • On message handler support async function;
  • Handle wrong node response and connect to new websocket server.

Third, further development of nkn-wallet-js repository is ongoing. The main task of the coding has been to debug and make it functional smoothly. For example, fix a bug where a balance value check error occurs when you have only one UTXO and merge pull requests from main contributors.

Finally, the nkn-mining repository has been newly created and is in the early development stage. As such, not all of the functions may be working properly and should only be used for testing currently.

NKN testnet scales up with community support

With the v0.3 Lemur release, the NKN testnet now supports large-scale node configurations. It was developed to support the deployment of thousands of nodes with a single click. With efforts and support from the NKN community, the public testnet had more than 1,500 nodes at one point, out of which only 233 were deployed by the NKN project team.

Continue testnet performance testing

Currently, the NKN testnet features a large scale deployment on Google Cloud. In addition, this release includes compilation script refactoring to support more compilation option as well as the optimization of the asset data storage format so that asset information is distributed in different blocks for better database performance.

Strong interest in NKN experimental mining

NKN announces experimental mining rewards

NKN team aims to encourage community members to help test our NKN public testnet and prepare for the launch of mainnet next year. The rules are very simple:

  • Anyone can run NKN node software and join NKN network
  • Reward is open for finding bugs and contributing code.You can find details here
  • Mining reward: test tokens can be converted to real token at certain ratio once mainnet is live next year, details are to be defined but no later than October 30, 2018

If you want to know how to participate in experimental mining, please click here

Strong community engagement on mining

Since out public testnet release, an active and constructive NKN core community emerged . This is evident from the rapid growth of number of Discord groups, number of participants, and different languages supported (Russian, Chinese, Japanese) by the community. There has been very high activity level of all NKN Discord groups over the last two weeks. The community is buzzing with excitement, and many people are telling us that they are having fun (like using Linux for the very first time)!

We would like to honor and thank a few key community contributors who have played a significant role in developing software, mining, and community technical support. This is in no way a complete list, and we will find future opportunity to thank more community members.

In alphabetic order (a round of applause):

  • ChrisT, insider, Lukas, New Kind of SF

Below is a partial list of community contributed articles (the full list is too long):

NKN releases 1-click miner with graphic user interface and dashboard

Link to download the software:https://github.com/nknorg/nkn-mining/releases/tag/v0.0.1

You can watch the video to learn more. Please click here

Partnering and ecosystem development

Bruce’s notes from Singapore Consensus Conference

Zheng “Bruce” Li, NKN’s Co-CEO, participated in Consensus Conference Singapore September 19–20. Here are a few of his highlights:

  • Several projects with strong SDK, including NKN, met together to find the best overall solution for dApp developers. We will announce some exciting news during San Francisco Blockchain Week.
  • Bruce met one of the leading mobile carriers in APAC, to explore collaboration opportunities in the region.
  • Bruce updated several NKN investors about our progress and received strong support from these institutional investors.

NKN Speaks to Executive MBA students at GSVLabs

Allen Dixon, NKN’s VP of Business Development, was invited to speak at Silicon Valley’s startup hub, GSVLabs, to a group of Executive MBA students about NKN and the Blockchain Market. The event sponsored by Fort Ross Ventures, is a continuation of the VC firms efforts to connect US companies to the Russian market. Contents covered by NKN included the benefits of NKN’s communication network technologies and top use cases as well as an active Q&A session afterward. The students were not only excited about the prospect of NKN’s vision and business model, but were able to bring new attract new members to our telegram community as well.

CryptoBazar hackathon updates

We are happy to report that 157 out of 272 registered participants have chosen NKN tasks and used NKN’s SDK. This shows strong support from the developer community in using NKN to build real-world applications. We have had an opportunity to glimpse of some early prototypes (e.g. games), and they already look quite amazing.

NKN is one of the four project partners that provide SDK and topics for CryptoBazar hackathon. CryptoBazar Hackathon is a half-year non-stop hacking activity. 12 countries will host and participate. Over 2000 developers have joined this hackathon.

Notable NKN publications

  1. 5G Enables NKN to Connect Real Economy
  2. Will NKN be a winning card in your hand?

Upcoming events

October 2018 will be another blockbuster month for NKN, with a lot of high profile events coming up. We invite you to join us, see our demo, and meet our team! Contact us if you want a free ticket (very limited supply), discount code, or volunteer to help us.

San Francisco Blockchain Week (Oct. 5th-12th):

San Francisco Blockchain Week is a week of educational, consumer, and developer focused events that aim to push the boundaries of local blockchain innovation, including speeches,panels,meet-ups, etc. We will announce an exciting news related to developers and SDK.

TIP Summit London 2018 (Oct.16th-17th)

Telecom Infra Project Summit ’18 is a two-day conference which brings international telecom and internet industry leaders, experts and investors together. The next wave of telecom infra will be shaped and discussed here. NKN will have a large booth with live demo. Our Co-founder Bruce Li and CTO Yilun Zhang will participate this top industry event.

TC3 Summit, Silicon Valley (Oct.17–18)

TC3 Summit provides a great opportunity to connect technical experts, service providers and vendors to explore and invest in a range of technologies. NKN Business Development VP, Allen Dixon will be speaking at this summit.

Home: https://nkn.org/

Email: [email protected]

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Reddit:https://www.reddit.com/r/nknblockchain

Discord: https://discord.gg/c7mTynX