This week, I got the chance to sit down with Frank ‘frakilk’ and Tobias ‘DESRT’— two gentlemen who have given us the fantastic resources ‘NanoCharts.info’ and ‘My Nano Ninja’ respectively. I wanted to talk with both enthusiasts as they have become champions in the continued quest of Nano’s decentralization effort.

Hey guys — thanks for making time during the busy holidays for this. First things first. Can you introduce yourselves for our readers?

Frank: Hi all! I’m Frank — known in the community as frakilk — I’m the developer of NanoCharts.info, which contains charts and graphs for those interested in how decentralized the Nano network is. Like others, I discovered Nano in December 2017 and immediately became interested in the simple yet world-changing potential of the project. As 2018 progressed, the issue of decentralizing the Nano network was being discussed more within the community. Trustworthy representative nodes were known to be key to Nano’s decentralization, but I noticed there was no easy way to track how voting weight assigned to a node changed over time. To tackle this problem Nano Charts was born. Tobias: What’s up?! I’m Tobias, the developer of My Nano Ninja. A tool specifically made for Nano representatives and statistics. The My Nano Ninja Community Spotlight can be found here.

Decentralization is very important and it is nice to see the community helping to increase the distribution of voting weight. Why are you two so passionate about the decentralization of the Nano network?

Frank: In my opinion, decentralization is one of the core tenets of any true cryptocurrency. No one entity should dictate how a cryptocurrency operates. Nano has made great strides in this area and is officially decentralized; however, it can improve significantly with a guiding hand from community involvement via awareness campaigns and services. For example, every Nano user should be aware that choosing a representative plays an important part in decentralizing the network. Nano Charts has a useful ‘Need a Representative?’ feature to help you choose a representative. I also highly recommend the My Nano Ninja service which presents a list of verified representatives to choose from. Tobias: The Delegated Proof of Stake consensus is far superior to other mechanisms like Proof of Work but it still presents its own questions to answer. It’s easy enough to delegate your weight to a different entity to keep the network decentralized — but how do you pick? I tried to solve that problem with My Nano Ninja. I wanted to create an educational resource hub where as much information as possible could be collected in one place for users to learn about representatives and feel secure about picking one.

My Nano Ninja’s representative scoring system

We recently saw the Nano Community Working Group pop up in the community. What problems is it seeking to tackle and has anything been started up yet?

Frank: Started up by Nano community members, the Nano Community Working Group aims to promote discussion and workable improvements to pain points within the Nano ecosystem. One of the first areas being tackled is the creation of a reliable “representative scoring” system. The scoring system can be viewed currently on My Nano Ninja as “Ninja Points”. It is still very much a work-in-progress and is being tweaked regularly.

“The aim is to give wallet and app developers access to a representative score to help users easily change their representative with confidence.”

Specifically, how do you intend to go about helping people choose a representative fairly?

Frank: Often Nano users are unsure which representative to assign their voting weight to. The aim is to give wallet and app developers access to a representative score to help users easily change their representative with confidence. To aid with further decentralization of the Nano network, you want them to choose a representative that is both reliable and does not have a large voting weight already attached to it. The “representative score” mentioned above can reduce this uncertainty with a single figure — calculated from a representative’s vote weight, up time and age. There are ongoing discussions to add additional reliability indicators for representatives beyond these three variables. Tobias: Currently we’re building the first real-world wallet implementation of the score with NinjaVault, where the score is built-in. It warns a user if their representative has a low score and can actively suggest a new representative for you. It’s an easy way to help users decentralize the network who are not familiar with the underlying tech or haven’t considered the representative voting mechanism yet. We take them by their hand and guide them with moderated lists to assure that the network becomes decentralized and stays that way.

Thanks for your time today guys. You’ve managed to make the charting and scoring of Nano representatives fun, interactive, and perhaps most importantly helpful. Your continued work in the Nano Community Working Group will be watched with keen interest — we will have to catch up with you all later this year to see your progress! Thanks to your commitment to strengthening the Nano infrastructure and ecosystem!