NIM is Coming to Town

Upgrades to the Nimiq Ecosystem

The Nimiq team has some exciting announcements to make just in time for the holidays. Grab a cup of your favorite hot beverage and let’s get started.

Nimiq main interfaces

There are three significant parts to the Nimiq main interfaces overhaul that we are announcing today:

1. Accounts manager and 3rd-party API

As part of our efforts to empower our community and its developers, we are releasing a new app in the Testnet today, called the Nimiq Accounts Manager. It is going to be the central place for all apps in the Nimiq ecosystem to interact with users’ accounts and addresses. It handles browser-stored Keyguard accounts and also transparently manages Ledger accounts (if you know the current Keyguard, then the Accounts Manager is basically a wrapper around it which provides a normalized interface not only to the Keyguard but to Ledger and other potential future account sources).

The Nimiq Accounts Manager comes with an open API to enable apps from all developers to access and interact with their users’ Nimiq accounts. A prime example is the new Nimiq Checkout integration, allowing every online store and every website to request a payment from their users with Nimiq, directly through the Nimiq Accounts Manager. Read the documentation on how to get started with integrating Nimiq Accounts Manager into your website!

Additionally to direct and easy checkout, most other account-managing functions are also available from the new API.

2. Multi-address accounts

Together with the new apps, we are enabling Multi-Address Accounts following the BIP-39/BIP-44/SLIP-0010 standards. With these new accounts, you can now have as many addresses as you want, all secured with the same seed and password. No more writing down new recovery words for every new address! And this also works for existing Ledger accounts!

Please note: existing Keyguard (browser-stored) accounts are still usable and will appear in your Safe as usual, but are not upgradeable, so you will have to create a new account in our new apps to make use of this feature.

3. An updated Nimiq Account management experience

We are proud to be able to show off what we worked on together with our UX/UI team members from overnice. Together with them, we redesigned and redefined what it means to interact with blockchain. We have made every action as simple and straightforward as possible by applying our new style guide and relentlessly cutting away distractions. Our goal is to make Nimiq accessible by everyone, not just crypto enthusiasts.

Our new Safe, Accounts Manager and Keyguard all speak the same design language, reduce interface friction and just let you do what you want to do.

All three apps are available on the testnet today, and will be released to the mainnet after internal security audits, feedback from the testnet period, further visual improvements and code cleanup.

As a reminder, the interfaces are also public on Github: Nimiq Safe, Nimiq Accounts Manager, Nimiq Keyguard. So if you have a question, an idea or want to help out, shoot us an issue or pull request there!

Additionally, the Mainnet Safe received a minimal update. We removed the initial educational slides, enabling users to login or create an account much quicker. We updated the header and added links in the top right to get to the most important places quickly and directly from the Safe.

Rust Nimiq core implementation

The first implementation of Nimiq Core was initially built in Javascript. For browsers, performance-intensive tasks are executed in WebAssembly and for Node.js they are compiled to a native C++ addon.

As announced some time ago, the next step is to create a new implementation in a performance and maintainability focused programming language: Rust. Choosing Rust also has the advantage that it allows compilation to both: native executable code and WebAssembly executable code.

The source code for this Rust implementation is now open to developers. When ready, this implementation is intended to handle performance critical jobs done by a Full Node. Preparing for that scenario, the current Nimiq Rust Core implementation focuses on:

Syncing the full blockchain from other peers

Allowing other full nodes to sync the blockchain from our rust implementation

Offering a JSON RPC interface similar to our JavaScript implementation

PRs and issues are always appreciated :)

Nimiq Developer Center

Initially, Nimiq’s Developer Reference was built with the Bug Bounty Program in mind. To provide web developers with an easy and fast entry into the Nimiq Ecosystem, we have created additional documentation and re-organized everything in the brand-new Nimiq Developer Center. Our goal is to not only allow experienced developers to get a Nimiq-based Web Application running with few lines of code but also show new users how easy it is to start programming with Nimiq. We aim to inspire and encourage web developers to try out Nimiq and all the censorship-resistant goodness it provides out of the box.

With these milestones we would also like to send out a big thank you to you, our valued members of the Nimiq Community. We hope you have a great time trying out these new Nimiq “holiday treats”! Team Nimiq continues its efforts to bring NIM to town by increasing the overall performance and usability of the Nimiq Ecosystem.

We wish you and your families peaceful and happy holidays, joyeuses fêtes, felizes festas, frohe weihnachten, feliz navidad, buone feste, fijne feestdagen, glad helg, mutlu tatiller, häid pühi, חג שמח, 节日快乐, 幸せな休日, สุขสันต์วันหยุด!

Your Team Nimiq