Highlights

NKN R&D team continues rapid software development with 8 releases over the last 2 weeks: completing 26 pull requests and 50 commits on NKN’s open source Github.

The public testnet and experimental mining continues to gain momentum. We reached more than 3,000 mining nodes on our public testnet, demonstrating the power of decentralization combined with the right economic model.

NKN shines in CryptoBazar Hackathon: attracting 157 hackers who produced several high quality applications based using the NKN SDK. The 1st prize winner was SpaceCats, an exciting 3D action game that many of you might enjoy playing.

We kicked off October with IoTeX partnership announcement for smart homes of the shared economy. And there will be more exciting partnerships to be announced during the golden harvest month of October.

R&D highlights

Github source code development progress

NKN testnet code development progress over the last two weeks is mainly reflected in the following three code repositories: nkn, nkn-client-js, nkn-wallet-js.

First, we can see that the nkn core repository is continuously being updated at a very rapid pace: 8 releases in two weeks! (https://github.com/nknorg/nkn/releases )

NKN Testnet v0.3.17-alpha

Fix node stop listening at 30001 if got too many open files;

Add retry count for failed accepting new connections before panic.

NKN Testnet v0.3.16-al pha

Fix race condition in porserver.

NKN Testnet v0.3.15-alpha

Fix go-portscanner not working by upgrading to the latest version.

NKN Testnet v0.3.14-alpha

Implement name service;

Use genesis block proposer to propose blocks when timeout to prevent forking when network is segmented;

Will only add signature chain whose hash is lowest of the same height;

Add naive multicast support;

Add max holding seconds in relay packet.

NKN Testnet v0.3.13-alpha

Fix node neighbor list deadlock;

Fix hashcache clear too fast and send duplicate transactions;

Fix block cache deadlock;

Update to Go 1.10.

NKN Testnet v0.3.12-alpha

Modify HandleMindChangingMsg mechanism

add vote for block only whein content type is BlockVote;

return when MindChangingMsg is higher than current voting.

NKN Testnet v0.3.11-alpha

Improve network update and recovery mechanism;

Fix chord and node port;

Add db rollback API;

Migrate to gogo/protobuf for better performance.

NKN Testnet v0.3.10-alpha

Massive improvement in system stability and robustness, especially in the following direction:

Make Chord connection more robust;

Make node topology more dense and more efficient routing;

More robust consensus especially in sync state.

Second, major updates for nkn-client-js repository:

Add multicast support and msg holding time option;

Use cross-fetch to replace fetch-everywhere to fix bugs in RN;

Handle wrong node response and connect to new web socket server.

Finally, we further improved nkn-wallet-js repository:

Update dist files;

Set http request’s Content-Type with ‘text/plain’ to support CORS.

NKN testnet continues growth

NKN testnet continues to grow and set new records in terms of number of nodes. The public testnet had more than 3,025 nodes observed on 9/27/2018, out of which only 233 were deployed by the NKN project team. It indicates that 92% of the test nodes were contributed by NKN community. This shows the real power of a decentralized community, which temporarily beat Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Litecoin (LTC) in terms of node count.

http://testnet.nkn.org

We believe a few factors spurred such growth and scalability:

Favorable economic incentive

Low hardware requirements on running a full NKN node

Stabilization of the NKN core software and public testnet

Better education and technical support, mostly by community itself

Growing enthusiasm of the community to try something new and fun

Fun statistics:

We did an informal Twitter survey of which cloud platform our community members run their nodes, and here is the final results with 208 votes. Google cloud is by far the favorite at 35%, followed by Digital Ocean at 27%, and then AWS at 20%.

IoTeX Partnership

On October 3rd, NKN and IoTeX have announced a joint collaboration to offer smart home device connectivity and management powered by blockchain. This partnership combines NKN’s highly scalable peer-to-peer communications network together with IoTeX’s blockchain protocol and smart contract capabilities to create a new trust and automation framework for short-term home rentals.

Over the last few weeks, developers from both teams worked closely together to integrate both project’s software into a smart home demo. NKN and IoTeX will have a live demo of this new IoT solution at the upcoming TIP (Telecom Infrastructure Project) Summit on Oct 16–17 in London.

For more information, please read the joint press release:

https://www.prweb.com/releases/nkn_collaborates_with_iotex_to_enable_the_smart_home_for_the_sharing_economy/prweb15804856.htm

NKN shines at CryptoBazar hackathon

During the month-long CryptoBazar Hackathon in September, NKN attracted 157 developers who produced several high quality applications based on the NKN SDK. The top prize winner SpaceCats by Nikolay Perevozchikov’s team is a 3D multiplayer game with amazing audio and video effects, and real-time playability. We would also like to congratulate 2nd place Danil Lykov and 3rd place Boris Koveshnikov, both of which developed different decentralized instant messengers. All these dApps showcase the real-time communication capability of the NKN protocol and our global testnet. Thanks to all the developers who chose NKN’s platform: you make NKN shine!

The winners of CryptoBazar Hackathon September 2018

The following teams won the top three of NKN awards.

№1, Nikolay Perevozchikov’s team: SpaceCats Battle 3D Multiplayer Game

№2, Danil Lykov’s JIN Messenger: JIN Decentralized Instant Messenger

№3, Boris Koveshnikov’s NKN Messenger: Decentralized Instant Messenger

SpaceCats game screen side by side with NKN blockchain explorer

You can find more information from our blog post on Medium:

https://medium.com/@NKN_ORG/nkn-shines-in-the-cryptobazar-hackathon-60479e9d5250

Upcoming events

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. NKN team will be meeting investors and partners there.

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.

About NKN

NKN is a new kind of network connectivity protocol & ecosystem powered by blockchain for an open, decentralized, and shared Internet. By blockchainizing the network layer, NKN is providing the missing third pillar of internet infrastructure. Just as Ethereum has done for compute and Filecoin for storage, NKN will decentralize network connectivity and transmission.

Home: https://nkn.org/

Email: contact@nkn.org

Telegram: https://t.me/nknorg

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NKN_ORG

Medium: https://medium.com/nknetwork

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nknetwork/

Github: https://github.com/nknorg

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

Discord: https://discord.gg/yVCWmkC