Summary: in order to recognize and reward our early adopters and miners, we would like to offer a special early redemption of the NKN test tokens mined up to date.

Why

Since we launched our public testnet in late August 2018, our community has shown tremendous interest in running NKN nodes. In early November we had 5,887 nodes running, out of which more than 98% were run by the community. Such a large scale testnet can already support many real-time applications such as SpaceCats 3D action gaming and dChat multimedia instant messaging to demonstrate NKN token utility. In addition, this large public testnet aid greatly in continuously debugging and improving NKN software scalability and performance.

Initially we announced that the test tokens can be converted to real NKN tokens at a certain ratio once the mainnet goes live, currently scheduled for June 2019. Our community has given us feedback that running a NKN node incurs costs in terms of hardware purchase, monthly cloud computing and networking costs.

We would like to address these concerns and give our community additional boost to continue and expand our public testnet. This way, early adopters and miners can get rewarded and compensated for the resources they have already contributed.

What

Today we are happy to announce that you will be able to redeem your NKN test tokens into Ethereum in early December 2018. Since this is a manual process that is labor intensive, we have set up some basic rules which intend to be simple, reasonable, and fair.

Conditions and restrictions:

The minimal NKN test token you can redeem is 1,000 from each wallet address Conversion ratio: 10,000:1, 10,000 NKN test tokens will be converted to 1 ETH The redemption period will be December 5–15, 2018 This early redemption is entirely voluntary: you can either redeem your NKN test tokens now into Ethereum, or wait for mainnet launch next year to convert to real NKN token.

Notes:

The ETH price was taken from CoinMarketCap.com, over 7-day period from November 27th to December 2nd. The average closing price of ETH during that period is 116.37 USD With the 10,000:1 redemption rate, each NKN test token is equivalent to 0.011637 USD The early redemption rate is much better than the official 5:1 test token to NKN token conversion rate at current NKN token price, which would have valued each NKN test token at 0.0046 USD. The reason we want to give this ONE-TIME ONLY boost is to recognize and reward early adopter and miners

How

Step 1: You (NKN test token holder) send an email to testnet@nkn.org with the following template filled with your specific information.

[Title of email]

NKN test token early redemption [your name or Discord/Telegram ID]

[Body of email]

NKN wallet address: from where you will send us your NKN test tokens:

Amount of NKN test token to convert: [e.g. 5,000]

ETH wallet address: to receive reward

Step 2: A NKN team member will respond with a NKN testnet wallet address to deposit the test tokens. Note this NKN testnet deposit address is unique to each email inquiry, in order to provide security and privacy.

Step 3: Test token holder deposits his/her NKN test tokens into the NKN testnet wallet address provided in Step 2, and provide the transaction hash as proof in email.

Step 4: NKN team member will deposit ETH into your designated receiving wallet address and send you the transaction hash to your email.

Step 5: You have successfully redeemed your NKN test tokens and received ETH reward.

FAQ

Q1: How do I know if the email from team is legit? Since I have a large amount of NKN test tokens and I don’t want to get scammed.

Answer: Evidence: the email comes from the team member with nkn.org email address and replying to your original email. Please check if it is indeed replying to your original email, and all information is correct. If you identify any suspicious actions, please contact our project admins in Telegram group to double-confirm. Security and safety of funds is our first priority.

Q2: Why you set up redemption limit of 1,000 NKN test token per wallet? What if my wallet has less than 1,000 tokens?

Answer: There are more than 1,400 NKN testnet wallet address, so it is physically infeasible for our small team to handle the redemption for everyone.

If your wallet has less than 1,000 test tokens mined, you have a few choices:

Aggregate with a few fellow miners to one wallet, and share the payouts. It is a bit like in a restaurant, where you share bills with fellow diners.

Wait until official swap when the NKN mainnet launch in June 2019.

Q3: Will you do another test token redemption before mainnet launch

Answer: We may or may not, depending on community feedback and overall market condition. As we demonstrated time and again, we aim to be transparent, reasonable, and fair to all stakeholders.

Q4: Do you need to own NKN tokens to do testnet mining?

Answer: No. Our testnet is permissionless, and requires no staking. Everyone can run a node and join the testnet, where there is no masternode because all nodes are equal. The mining reward is purely for paying the shared resource (network connectivity and bandwidth) and utility (relaying traffic for users).