The release of OpenAlias has been well received by the NavCoin community. At the time of writing, there have been hundreds of OpenAlias addresses registered under @nav.community. If you haven’t already joined them by creating OpenAlias address of your own take a moment to do it now. All that’s required to get it going is install the latest version of your wallet, and register your address here:

https://openalias.nav.community

The competition to celebrate the launch of NavCoin OpenAlias was run over the past week, and at its conclusion, there had been a total of 8703 actions performed by users through the app. Halfway through the week, the prize pool was doubled to 4000 NAV — with 2000 NAV for the grand prize winner, plus ten runner-up prizes of 200 NAV each. The lucky winners have been drawn and are in the process of being notified. A list of winners will be released in the next day or so.

Also wanted to give a shout out to Prodpeak for integrating a very handy tool to view your alias address in NavExplorer:

https://www.reddit.com/r/NavCoin/comments/9e06vy/slick_alias_tool_balance_is_confirmed_by/

Live-Streamed Education Session #1

The first live-streamed NavCoin Core education session is being held Thursday at 0830 NZST. This is roughly 12 hours after this Community News goes live. You can also visit this link to figure out what time this equates to for you:

https://bit.ly/2OaVRqW

Prole will take us through the NavCoin Protocol Improvement Proposals (NPIPs) for Static Rewards and Cold Staking. These talks aren’t aimed at a highly technical audience, so even if you’re not a developer it will be worth tuning in.

If you can’t make the live stream, don’t worry. After the sessions the videos will remain on Youtube, so you can watch and re-watch them later, and share them on your social channels too. Here’s where to watch the live-stream:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjDs4JceVSsaeCyvkA9cWCg/live

Developer News

Privacy Update

Privacy is an important part of NavCoin’s values, and while NavTech was a great solution at the time, the privacy aspect of digital currency payments has evolved a long way since it was originally built. Alex and Prole have been planning and researching ways to implement a new on-chain privacy method for NavCoin, and have posted a quick update on progress here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/NavCoin/comments/9eevo4/little_update_from_dev_team/

The NavTech servers will remain offline until the new privacy solution is ready. However, the NavTech code is still freely available on GitHub to anyone who wants to use it, or run their own server. Find it here:

https://github.com/Encrypt-S/navtech

Community Projects

Prodpeak (on Discord) has just had his second Pull Request merged into the NavCoin Core codebase on Github. His work demonstrates that you don’t have to make complex protocol updates to be a NavCoin Core contributor. Check out the PR here:

https://github.com/NAVCoin/navcoin-core/pull/292#pullrequestreview-153556106

BuckoNZ (on Discord) has further enhanced his Odroid XU4 NavCoin stakebox build. After the release of NavCoin 4.3.0 he was able to get a Graphical User Interface (GUI) instance up and running. You can find out more about his project here. Maybe there’s a way you could help out?

https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=98&t=32171

Coming Roadmap Updates

With a number of proposed releases in the next few months, Prole is writing an article that explains them, why they are being proposed, and how they will be bundled together. This is planned for publication the next few days and will be shared on social media — stay tuned.

Core Content Creators

Website

Work is progressing on the page-by-page update of the NavCoin.org website. The page design templates have been finalised and content continues to be added as it’s created. Stay tuned for updates on when the refreshed site will be ready to be published. Like the current NavCoin and NavHub websites, it will be a static site on Github, making it easier for community members to contribute to and improve it.

Video

There are two new videos currently in production. The first is for the NavCoin Community Fund and is intended to inspire people to get involved with this exciting open-source project by creating and submitting proposals. Alongside this, the Community Collab website is being refined and tested after its migration to AWS last week.

The second video is for the homepage of the refreshed NavCoin.org website and will showcase the ecosystem that’s grown up around NavCoin and its global community. The purpose of this video is to give newcomers to NavCoin a brief, but engaging introduction to NavCoin. As well as remind existing community members of everything that they have achieved so far, and how they could contribute to NavCoin’s development in the future.

When they’re finished both videos will be available on the NavCoin Youtube channel and shared on social media:

https://www.youtube.com/c/NavCoinCore

That’s all for this week,

NavCoin Core