Continued engagement from the NavCoin community proves to be the recipe for success as talking points and ideas flow thick and fast from new arrivals and old timers.

Staking and Voting on Exchanges

Since NavCoin is a proof of stake network, the number of coins owned by a staking address is equal to the proportion of votes that address gets towards key network decisions like the ledger consensus, soft fork activations as well as the DAO functions like Community Fund proposals and payment requests. Until now that has meant the main network participants are the end users of the coins themselves, but recently some of the major exchanges have started to provide staking on behalf of the users with deposited coins in their system.

There is some concern in the community that since the exchanges have access to a reasonably large proportion of coins, if the exchanges decided to turn on staking it could make soft forks and DAO votes harder to pass.

While staking on exchanges could bring a new wave of users to the exchanges and introduce them to NavCoin, the impact of centralisation needs to be discussed and mitigated. One solution that was discussed was to create a tiered staking system where coins that are locked into a staking ‘term’ would receive the full reward and have full voting weight while unlocked coins would have a reduced rewards and voting powers. Since economic nodes wouldn’t be able to lock in the coins to a term it would reduce their weight on the network lessening the impact of their staking and incentivising users to withdraw and stake independently.

Some other options were discussed such as building an exchange integration for NavPool so users with coins on the exchange could manage their votes via the NavPool platform. Or potentially partnering with one of the smaller exchanges to integrate voting directly into their platform.

Ultimately the approach needs to be further discussed and designed but there are some good ideas there already which could easily help to mitigate the issues caused by centralised exchange staking.

Marketing Videos and YouTube Ads

As a community driven coin the technical development of NavCoin has always been innovative and strong, while promotion of the project has always taken the back seat. With the NavCoin DAO able to sponsor marketing activities we’ve seen various projects be funded and produced from review videos to banner campaigns. Some community members expressed interest in using their skills to create short promotional clips about NavCoin that can be featured on the website and social channels as well as potentially as paid adverts on YouTube and Twitter. The idea was warmly welcomed and after some more planning to define what the videos will be about and what paid advertising will take place, we should see a community fund proposal appear to sponsor the work.

Community Trello Board

With the community being active and wanting to collaborate more the need for a better way of organising and volunteering for tasks has been asked for. Previously there has been a community Trello board setup but it has gone disused for some time. The community sentiment was that this is still a good way to organise the community so some effort is going to be made to clear out the old trello board and start using it again.

The board itself is public to view, but if you would like to participate and comment on tasks or volunteer your time to have tasks assigned to you then you will need to register for Trello and ask one of the board admins to add you as a collaborator.

Potential Europe Meetup / Conference

The community is interested to put on a NavCoin Meetup in Europe in the coming months. The idea has not been expanded on yet but the idea would be to put on some mid size event, probably half way between a casual meetup and a conference. The community is looking to connect with blockchain interest groups in Amsterdam, Berlin or other central European cities which would be interested to have some speakers present on blockchain related topics. The talks could span from an introduction to Bitcoin & Blockchain, DAO’s, Private Transactions, How to keep your Crypto Secure and of course the latest NavCoin developments and a few NavCoin community members are interested to share their expertise and experience.

Privacy Protocol Debate Continued

There has been more discussion around what privacy protocol to implement as some advancements have been made in the field of zkSNARKS recently which made the community wonder if ValueShuffle+ was still the right choice to go with.

In the end of the debate it was concluded that we could go around in circles for a long time trying to decide on what technology to use as private transaction protocols are constantly evolving. The community agreed that rather than having non-technical people debate the technical advantages of one technology versus another ad infinitum they would be happy to set the requirements and let the developers and cryptography experts recommend a course of action that meets those requirements. The most important requirements being that whatever privacy protocol is developed, it should offer the highest level of privacy while still being publicly auditable with no private staking. The reasons being that auditabiltiy provides detection of any potential hyperinflation caused by bugs in the cryptography and non-private staking means that the NavCoin proof of stake chain remains secure from 51% attack even if any potential bug in the cryptography was found.

With those requirements accepted as valid it is now up to the NavCoin development community and any other interested parties to design and present the best solution which meets those requirements.

Community Fund Reserve

Some community members have been brain storming ways to hedge the value of the NavCoin community fund against potential price volatility in the crypto markets. As we’ve seen the market price of cryptocurrencies can vary wildly in a short space of time, at the 2018 peak the community fund would have been worth $2.5M USD per year and now its worth a fraction of that annually.

One proposal is to form a committee of community members to manage a small proportion of the community fund and realise the assigned funds into USDC and/or BTC during the height of the next long term up trend. The actions of this committee would be governed by the NavCoin DAO and each committee member would be part of a multi signature wallet which controls the funds.

There is still some way to go to figure this idea out fully, but it sounds like a reasonable way to hedge some of the network’s assets against price fluctuations and retain enough value within the fund to ensure a high level of development and marketing continues through market down turns.

The Next Community Roundtable

NavCoin’s monthly Community Roundtable takes place on the first Monday of every month at 8pm GMT. The next one is scheduled for Monday 2 September.

https://navhub.org/events

The Roundtable event is open to anyone to read or contribute to the conversation. If you would like to be part of the future of NavCoin then all you have to do is get involved. And as always a special thanks to salmonskinroll for hosting the roundtables and taking the meeting minutes.

Don’t forget that you can receive this article by email. If you would like to be added to the mailing list, please sign up here.

Till next month!

— proletesseract

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