On the heels of NKN’s open sourcing last Tuesday June’12, I have the most exciting progress to report. In London last Saturday June’16, we have launched a preview testnet of NKN, a web-based NKN blockchain Explorer, and an experimental Javascript SDK for app developer. The key purpose is to showcase the NKN token utility to transact network bandwidth and connectivity resources.

You can find them all here, and please note that these are live nodes running the exact software as we open sourced on June’12. This is NOT a mockup.

Preview testnet

The preview testnetwork consists of 15 live nodes deployed globally in 15 regions (US West, US East, US Central, Canada, Brazil, India, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, UK, Holland, Belgium, Germany, and etc).

NKN blockchain Explorer

The NKN blockchain Explorer can show the Signature Chain as Proof of Relay in NKN network, which shows how users can use NKN token to buy bandwidth, and how the relaying nodes share the token rewards, as well as getting additional mining reward for successfully proposing the next block. In addition, the Chord DHT routing showcase the decentralized routing protocol NKN uses to relay traffic.

Our Cellular Automat based consensus algorithm can converge to a final consensus within 2–3 steps. Each step means the communication interaction between the nodes, and is bound by network latency (typically<1s). It means we can reach global consensus within 2–3 seconds.

Experimental NKN Javascript SDK

The experimental NKN Javascript SDK enables application developers to build on top of NKN’s true p2p networking stack, starting with as few as 4 lines of code to build a simple messaging application. It is also demo’d on “Use cases” tab in our testnet demo website.