NIX Platform – Total Privacy For All

NIX Platform is described as a “next generation privacy currency and multi-layered interoperability platform which fuels anonymity-focused decentralized applications (dApps) and smart contracts, providing the option of adding a best-in-class privacy layer to any blockchain”.

It’s a platform that combines Atomic Swaps and privacy using the Ghost Protocol to provide the world anonymous and decentralized transfer of assets among different blockchains.

NIX feels that user integration is a key issue in the industry in that, although the technology is extremely progressive and advanced, there are not enough tangible uses for blockchain technology. It is because of this that they are looking to create ecosystems with specific use cases. In order for NIX to achieve this, they are adopting multiple privacy mechanisms, scaling solutions, smart contracts integration, sidechain utilities, and ease of use towards the end consumer specifically in speed and environment.

An introductory promotional video can be found below

NIX Platform Introductory Video



In Conversation

I sat down with Fernken, core team member, to discuss the NIX Platform in more detail

When did you first hear about Crypto and what was it that drew you in to the space?

NIX Platform is constituted, at the moment, by 18 contributors and 2 advisors. All came to the crypto space at different times and for different motives; but generally speaking, we got immersed into this space driven mainly by the solutions that the blockchain technology is bringing to the world: systems that allow people to have definitive control over their money and their own destiny.

What is your background and what was the driving force in creating NIX?

NIX Platform was born on April 2018 with one mission over the table: Deliver intra-chain functional privacy features that provide intra-chain, cross-chain and inter-DEX private transactions in the future, along with privacy layering for any dApp developed on top of NIX.

The core team is led by the NIX founder, Matthew Tawil, a passionate blockchain developer with years of experience in the industry. His passion for privacy and decentralization – welcoming anyone willing to contribute – has allowed the creation of panels for development, operations, and marketing and design fronts, working harmoniously to deliver the aforementioned goals of the wider project.



2018 was a tough year for the Crypto market. However, from a tech perspective, we witnessed even more innovation and advancements than ever before. Can you talk about the progress you made last year?

Market conditions have not been an issue for NIX Platform. NIX was born and nurtured in the bear market and we take great pride in the maturity and growth achieved so far. It’s allowed NIX to build a strong leadership team to guide us along the way, focused on delivering innovative technology, features and even world-first protocols that were sometimes not even part of NIX’s initial roadmap.

In 2018, at mainnet launch, NIX Platform released Ghostnodes, allowing coin holders to help secure the NIX Network and facilitate privacy transactions conducted via the Ghost Protocol (NIX’s fundamental layered privacy consensus). Within weeks we had hundreds of these distributed masternodes live on the mainnet.

NIX’s first functional privacy feature – the Ghost Vault – was delivered in Q3 2018. This unique and user-friendly implementation of zerocoin technology is embedded in UI and Core Wallets and is responsible for hiding users balance from the chain.

The ‘Ghost Vault’

Early Q4 brought a big breakthrough in the privacy field: roll-out of the ‘Commitment Key Packs’ scheme implementation; a unique and fully-custom solution that expands on the isolated zero-knowledge structure, allowing for third parties to conduct direct zero-knowledge payments. This technology is the base of the innovative 2-Way Ghosting feature which enables full sender/receiver privacy in one single address-less transaction. Effectively once coins are minted into the ghost vault, the coins are transferable to any other ghost vault without trace, a completely different proposition to standard on-chain obfuscation methods.

Q4 2018 saw the implementation of Lease Proof of Stake (LPoS), a custom smart-contract driven consensus brought in to create a safe, trustless and secure staking ecosystem, allowing holders of any amount the ability to lease their coins to a third-party wallet while still retaining total ownership of those coins. This means anyone can cold-stake their coins in a personal capacity but more interestingly, resulted in the birth of a competitive marketplace of service providers offering leased staking services to the NIX community.

Around this time the consensus was also enhanced with the introduction of a unique and trustless implementation assuring the fair distribution of Ghost Protocol fees. This Ghostnode Service Fee Distribution system ensures that all active nodes equally receive rewards for backing public to private transactions every 720 blocks.

NIX Platform also made huge progress in the user experience field; the appealing GUI Wallet was also part of Q4 2018’s releases, it offers complete control over all transactions, one-click Ghostnode setup, privacy features and more. The interface is simple yet sophisticated. Another accomplishment is the release of Mobile Wallets, delivered on January 2019; they are available for Android and got an expeditious approval from Apple, being already accessible on the App Store a week after submission.

One Click Masternode Setup

NIX Platform, aside of heavily focusing on development, makes efforts to establish and incorporate Partnerships and Advisors. At present we have as partners Blocknet, an interoperability infrastructure that enables the transfer of data and value across different blockchains, and Chainzilla, a company that facilitates communications and work between tech communities -including Komodo and other projects- streamlining the development of blockchain and decentralized applications. They both help NIX accomplish targets of increasing decentralized technology usability and private trading.

In the advisory board, we have academic Dr. Sriram Vishwanath, a Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at The University of Texas at Austin, benefiting NIX to expand its approach to college communities.

We’ve also recently welcomed renowned Bitcoin advocate Charlie Shrem, a successful entrepreneur and early founder of the Bitcoin Foundation. Charlie has worked to contribute to crypto projects for the sake of decentralization and people having true power over the privacy of their assets. Charlie’s presence in the NIX advisory panel helps spread our vision of an interoperable, decentralized privacy platform to any blockchain as well as for new technological horizons.

Moving further into 2019, development wise, NIX Platform advanced and delivered in the hardware storage field: NIX is now integrated in both Ledger and Trezor. As a result, users can easily carry NIX everywhere, counting on a system that enhances assets’ security at all times. Moreover, NIX added the Ghostnode Tool App, a feature that enables users to start and manage their nodes via supported hardware wallets.

In conclusion, 2018 was a successful year for NIX, we share a huge sense of pride and accomplishment for delivering regardless of market conditions, and keep working towards the goal of making of NIX a privacy tool for all cryptocurrencies.

NIX Wallet – “The Best Wallet in Crypto

What was your finest achievement in 2018?

NIX Platform has achieved so much since its creation: exchange listings, protocol improvements, strong partnerships and much more; nonetheless, given the fact that privacy is our most valuable asset, we can say that the development and prompt delivery of privacy features like the Ghost Vault and 2-Way Ghosting mechanism above mentioned, which together provide full private address-less transactions, are one of our biggest achievements in 2018.

We believe that NIX’s finest achievements are yet to come. The future always brings new opportunities and we are focused on delivering further privacy oriented technologies, new features and development that allows third parties to build communications and dApps on top of NIX Platform, so 2019 is an exciting time to be involved in the NIX project.

Privacy, whether it be financial or otherwise, is clearly of huge importance to your project. Can you give an explanation as to why you believe privacy to be so important and how Crypto can help solve those issues?

Nowadays surveillance is all around us; financial institutions know with details how much we own and how we spend it, online engines know what we seek and what we like, not to mention social networks are vulnerable to being accessed by almost anyone.

At NIX, we have a strong belief of privacy being actually about freedom. We believe it stands by the side of freedom of thought and speech.

This gives the public a sense of how important privacy is and why it should be respected. Users should not feel guilty for having a basic right granted. Users do not have to choose privacy instead of security. They have the right to choose both.

Cryptocurrencies are the future of assets interchange, as they deliver transactions that are: fast and globally accessible, irreversible, secured mathematically and run without a central authority. Users having real and full control of their money.

The appearance of Blockchain technology brought a secure and trustless system to transact assets, but the lack of privacy has been a concern to countless users as, although user identity is disguised on principle, there are public records on cryptocurrency operations left on blockchains.

Privacy and centralization represent an issue that has not been completely addressed in digital currencies, that was the reason of the creation of NIX Platform, an infrastructure that allows every single supported coin to have the possibility of being traded privately in a prompt, secure and decentralized manner.

Ghost Protocol

Your primary objective, as declared in your whitepaper, is “to grant the means and resources to empower people across the world to achieve independence in their social, economic, and global structure. These assets span from financial security and freedom to private data management and even social content Autonomy.” Can you please provide some detail as to how you are looking to achieve these goals?

As per the resources, we have to understand that NIX Platform is not a platform for itself, not a closed structure that’s isolated to its own medium – rather it’s a fluid mechanism that works to widen its approach to compliment any blockchain in any environment through interoperability and privacy layering.

We are providing the network with privacy tools that can be used by any developer to create dApps addressed to solve real world issues in different aspects. Blockchain technology is so powerful that companies from different areas are investing into adapting it to their systems, so envisaging the adoption of our protocols into these systems is an easy task keeping in mind the focus we have on innovation and interoperability.

According to your roadmap in Q1 we will see some significant changes and improvements to your mobile wallet namely the integrations of Ghost Protocol, Ghost Masternodes and LPoS contract management. Can you please give some detail into these three products and why they are important to your project’s ecosystem?

Mobile Wallets were released in January 2019 and have basic functionalities such as viewing of balances, sending and receiving of NIX and security features. Soon the Ghost Protocol, Ghostnodes and LPoS features will be integrated into mobile apps and available on-the-move in the simple and flexible framework that mobile wallets offer.

In terms of importance to the NIX ecosystem, we plan on making our protocols, services and functionalities accessible and as easy to use as possible (UX is a huge part of our development process), so we want our flagship features to be available in everyone’s hand no matter where they are in the world.

Simple Staking in the Ghost Vault

What can we expect from NIX in 2019? Are there are many surprises around the corner?

NIX Platform continues to accelerate the technological progress made so far and we expect 2019 to be a huge year as we to work on the goal of achieving privacy independence for all digital currencies.



A recent breakthrough that will see roll-out in Q2 2019 is the implementation of NIX Governance, a decentralized off-chain funding/decision model accessible to all invested stakeholders who actively participate in the NIX ecosystem. This places the future of the platform directly into the hands of the NIX community and investors by giving equal power to stakers and Ghostnodes through a novel proposal/voting mechanism. An Off-Chain Governance paper along with a Development Fund Financial Breakdown has already been shared to the community.



With the goal of implementing inter-DEX private transactions, NIX Platform has been working on the DEX Manager dApp, a bridge between decentralized exchange platforms integrating atomic swaps with our own utilization layer. Greater amounts of liquidity but more importantly, privatized trades will expedite the adoption of NIX as a privacy-centric interoperability platform.

We’re also looking forward to developing the Software Development Kit so that anyone interested can develop on top of NIX, sidechain tools are already in the planning stage which will ultimately promote the interchangeability of assets under remit of external protocol rules.

There are more items being lined up for the roadmap and more activities on the horizon that will further encourage user adoption. In terms of surprises, we have several items lined up which our community will be pleased with. Amongst other things we have an exciting protocol enhancement to facilitate a use-case that we feel will lead to expedited adoption of the Ghost Protocol so keep an eye out for our announcements over the coming days and weeks.

What are your views on Crypto as a whole for 2019?

Crypto space has no other outcome than continuous expansion and adoption. We will see the development of more valuable tools to promote and facilitate the use of BTC as a means of payment, and the creation of more and more blockchain based solutions.

Evolving requirements for money and traditional financial systems flaws demand the expansion of Bitcoin adoption. NIX Platform and real value blockchain based projects will play an important role in the achievement of the required factors to help promote digital currencies expansion.

Can you summarise your ultimate vision for NIX?

Our vision – and laser focus – is to gain adoption as a privacy currency and multi-layered interoperability infrastructure, providing anonymity-focused tools, decentralized applications and smart contracts. We want to provide the option of adding best-in-class privacy features to any blockchain or dApp – without the end user needing any technical knowledge.



I thank Fernken for his time



Alex Libertas



If you would like to learn more you can find all of NIX’s relevant information below:



NIX CMC

Website

Whitepaper

GitHub

Blockchain Explorer

Social: Telegram Twitter, Reddit, Medium, ANN, Discord, Facebook

Exchanges: Mercatox, IDAX



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