Nav Coin is a interesting project that has a very solid foundation with a TON of potential for the future. Their roadmap is jam packed with things that could make Nav a game changing coin.

Nav is one of my favorite coins and in this write up I will be exploring all aspects of why I think it is a great investment. As always, please do not take this or anything I say as investment advice. I’m just sharing my thoughts and please do your own research before making an investments.

My Research Criteria

When I’m researching a coin I will look at a handful of different criteria to determine if I’m interested in investing in it. The criteria I look at is as follows:

Coin Basics: Basic coin information and details

Basic coin information and details Unique Selling Proposition (USP): What makes this coin unique?

What makes this coin unique? Team: Determine the quantity and quality of the team

Determine the quantity and quality of the team Transparency and Communication: Do they keep investors in the loop?

Do they keep investors in the loop? Community: Determine if there is a active community around the coin

Determine if there is a active community around the coin Competitor Comparison: How does the coin compare to its competitors?

How does the coin compare to its competitors? Investment Potential: How big could this coin be in the future?

I will be running NAV through each one of these criteria points to determine the quality of investment.

Coin Basics

Before we get into the details of this coin, let’s first look at the basic coin details so you can get a better feel for what Nav is about.

Created June 2nd, 2014 as SummerCoinV2 then Rebranded to Nav Coin

Current Market Cap: $15.6 million

Based off Bitcoin 0.13

Proof of Stake at 5% Annually

Uses a Dual Blockchain (called the Subchain) to offer Optional Private Transactions

30 Second Transaction Time

Segwit Activated

What Makes this Coin Unique?

Before we get into what makes this coin unique, I want to make it clear that Nav’s fundamentals and foundation are extremely solid. Since Nav is based on Bitcoin, it contains all of the great features of Bitcoin which gives Nav a strong foot to stand on when building out more unique features.

If a coin doesn’t have a solid foundation to begin with, it will be hard to sustain long term. It would be like trying to build a mansion on quick sand.

Utilizes Dual Blockchain Technology (NavTech)

NavTech is something that initially caught my eye when I was researching Nav for the first time. Nav runs on two blockchains (called the sub chain) which is used to break any link or relationship between the sender and receiver when sending payments.

This technology allows the users to send optional anonymous payments through their wallet. When sending a payment, you have an option to choose between a normal payment and an anonymous payment.

From my research, Nav isn’t the most private or anonymous coin bit it does add a layer above normal transactions (such as Bitcoin). However, the Nav team is busy working on an upgrade to the NavTech which will bring even more anonymity and privacy to payments.

Segwit Activated

Segwit was activated on May 21st, 2017 and becomes one of only a handful of other currencies to have Segwit. This provides a lot of benefits to the coin, but the biggest one being that Nav is now able to run Lightning Network whenever it becomes ready to use.

The other major benefit of Segwit is that it is now possible run smart contracts on the Nav platform. This opened up a huge opportunity and paved the way for ADapps (more on this in a minute).

Other Features:

30 second transaction times

5% annual interest when staking

Custom Raspberry Pi’s called NavPi that can be used to stake

Low transaction fees

The features mentioned above would already make this coin severely undervalued at $15 million market cap. However, they aren’t the main reasons why I’m excited about the potential of this coin.

Upcoming Features

The main reasons why I’m excited for this coin are below.

NavTech Polymorph

From Nav Coin’s websites:

“ NAVTech Polymorph is a fusion of NAVTech’s Anon transactions and Changelly’s instant exchange. It will enable users to send any one of 25+ cryptocurrencies anonymously through the dual blockchain powered NAVTech anonymous transaction system.”

This is huge.

Let me give an example of why this is a game changer. If I wanted to pay someone anonymously and only had Bitcoin then Polymorph would allow this to happen. Here’s how: BTC goes in, it gets converted to Nav and put through the dual blockchain and then BTC is spit back out to the person you wanted to send it to.

This adds a layer of anonymity to all of the currencies on Changelly by using Nav.

Some other benefits of Polymorph are summed up perfectly by Colvano in the Nav Coin ANN forum:

1. Marketing: Polymorph will provide a huge marketing opportunity. The partnership with changeling gives trust for new users. Also there is an actual product that can be marketed. There is no need to specifically focus on NAV Coin, polymorph is the product and potential users will find out about NAV Coin and how it works. 2. Unique product: NAV Coin is no longer just another alt coin with anon capability. NAV Coin offers a product that is unique. 3. Volume: NAV Coin will see a growth in usage because of how polymorph works. This will create more transaction on the blockchain, which also enhances privacy. More transactions will bring more transaction fees into each block, profitable for stakers. 4. Locked up coins: To process anon transactions one has to lock up NAV Coins. The more NAV coins are locked up for Navtech, the less nav is available for sale. 5. Anon fees: Anon transactions are currently processed by a number of servers. Future development aims to enable everyone to easy process anon transactions. At the moment this is possible for everyone, however setting up a navtech server isn’t easy for everyone. Every anon transaction comes with a fee for the processing node. The more transactions, the more fees can be collected. So next to the 5% stake reward, NAV coin holders can also generate a number of TX fee for income. 6. Exchange volume: the instant exchanging will work with exchanges. The more transactions are done with polymorph, the more transactions are made with exchanges. This way nav coin volume grows on the exchanges. Volume is important for exchanges and traders.

Currently, the Nav team is 33% done with and is getting closer each week to releasing it publicly. It’ll be interesting to watch how the market reacts to this.

Anonymous DApps (ADapps)

I briefly mentioned this above, but this innovation could be huge for Nav. We are all aware of the huge Dapp craze going on right now with Ethereum but one market that is completely untapped are anonymous DApps.

Nav is still in the planning stage for this, but if done correctly Nav would be the first platform to offer something of this kind. This would provide increased anonymity for both the developers and the users.

Projects in niches that are geared towards being anonymous such as gambling, sports betting, black market and others could see a huge benefit by switching over to Nav. If this were to happen Nav would see a huge use case that would really take the coin to the next level.

In a recent blog post update on July 6th, there was mention of people and projects that are interested in Nav’s DApp platform if/when it becomes a real thing. So it sounds like once it gets off the ground there could be immediate interest once it launches.

Another thing to keep an eye out for the very near future regrading Nav’s DApp platform is the whitepaper that being released soon. In a July 19th blog post, the following was said:

While the Engineering team have been making progress on our various development projects it has freed our Chief Engineer Craig MacGregor to continue working on the draft white papers for the upcoming Anonymous Dapp platform. Most of the research for the platform was finalised on Craig’s trip to Berlin with Alex and now it is simply a matter of formalizing it into a series of documents for public consumption.

I would expect a nice boost in price and more people becoming interested in Nav once this whitepaper is released.

Final Thoughts Regarding Upcoming Features

Nav Coin already boasts an impressive amount of new tech and features in their current state. However, I think we will see Nav really explode once they begin releasing more info about their upcoming keystone projects. This is what can really take Nav to the next level and I’m excited to see how thngs unfold.

The Team

Unlike a lot of coins out there, the NAV team are 100% transparent about who is on the team. This includes real names, actual pictures and links to all of their LinkedIn profiles. Someone outside of Crypto might think this would be standard practice, but it isn’t. The simple fact that we know exactly who is behind NAV goes a long way to build trust.

The Nav team is located in Auckland, New Zealand and the majority of the team members are from the University of Auckland. Nav is a project of Encrypt S Limited, which is a company that provides blockchain products and services. The lead developer, Craig MacGregor, is the CEO of this company.

Below you can see all of the engineers who are currently working on NAV:

It’s nice to see more than just one or two people working on a project. With 5 engineers working on NAV it’s clear that they are capable of innovating and developing much quicker than most other coins. Looking through their LinkedIn profiles they all are qualified and competent.

Not only are there 5 developers, but there are also a full digital marketing team as well as some community developers:

Marketing is a huge aspect of crypto and often times the coin with the best marketing will win over the coin with the best tech. So it’s a positive to see a coin with top notch tech be complimented by a full marketing team. They are currently in the process of starting an Google Adwords campaign.

Final Thoughts About the Team

The Nav Coin team is really impressive and is qualified to continue developing and growing the coin. They have the recipe for success with good developers + a marketing team.

A minor concern that may play out in the long term is if/when Encrypt S Limited, the parent company of Nav Coin, starts working on other projects. This could divide the attention of the team away from Nav and onto other projects. Currently, the entire team is focused solely on Nav but this could change in the future. Not a huge worry yet, but something to keep an eye on.

Transparency and Communication

They are fantastic about keeping their investors and the community in the loop with regards to what they are working on.

Weekly Updates on their Blog

Each Wednesday they publish a new blog post where they explain what they accomplished in the past week, what they are working on and the progress they are making towards the items on the roadmap. This is awesome to see as an investor.

Active Roadmap

On the roadmap they update the progress of each item each week. This is great for seeing what projects we can expect to be accomplished soon. Also, the percentage completed next to each item on the roadmap is actually accurate too. When they say a project is 95% complete they mean it.

The items currently in progress on their roadmap

Their track record for checking items off on their roadmap is impressive. Scrolling further down on the roadmap you will find all of the projects they have completed in the past. This is great to see.

Developers Active Slack + Professional Social Media Channels

The developers are active in Slack and don’t shy away from answering questions. Their Twitter and Facebook are both very professional and are a great way to keep updated with them.

Extremely Active Github

8 different repositories have been active within the last 14 days under the Nav Coin Github. This is a good sign that the project is being actively worked on and all of the talk on their roadmap is being backed up with their work.

Final Thoughts Regarding Transparency/Communication

Nav’s level of communication and transparency is something not a lot of coins have, even the ones in the top 20 in terms of market cap. Considering the fact that Nav’s market cap is only $15 million is insane.

Community

An active community is vital for the success of a coin. There are a handful of metric that I look at to determine how active a community is.

Social Media Stats

The quantity of social media followers can be misleading, but it is a good way to get a quick and dirty analysis of how popular a coin is.

Twitter Followers: 9.6k

Reddit Subscribers: 380

Slack Members: 977

Telegram Members: 552

Bitcoin Talk Announcement Pages: 1,171

Slack and Telegram

These two channels are the main way the developers interact with the community. It is also where the majority of the community hangs out on a daily basis.

Bitcoin Talk

This is also a very active place for the community to interact with each other. The developers also pop in here and answer questions and share updates fairly consistently.

Reddit

Reddit is probably the weakest link in terms of where the community hangs out. As of right now it only has 380 subscribers and there isn’t a whole lot of activity on the subreddit.

There has been some growth in the past few months according to Reddit Metrics, which is a good sign:

Community Made Website

There is a community created website called https://navtechservers.com where there are guides and tutorials about getting started with Nav. Things such as how to setup your wallet, how to setup your NavPi and more general info regarding Nav.

Seeing websites such as this created by the community is a great sign of strength in the community.

Competitor Analysis

When I look for competitors I try to find other coins/projects that are doing similar things and then compare/contrast. However, Nav is somewhat unique in the fact that it doesn’t just fall into one category of coins.

With that being said, there are a few coins that we can compare to Nav:

Verge ($XVG) — $40 million Market Cap

Verge is mainly focused on being the most anonymous and private coin, which it is doing a good job at. It is trying to compete with the likes of Monero, Dash and Zcash. This is one place where Verge and Nav overlap in terms of features and market.

The main reason why I chose Verge as a main competitor is because it will eventually be implementing smart contracts by RSK.

Anonymous + Smart Contracts = Anon DApp platform Nav is working on

Verge looks like it is going to be a direct competitor to Nav in this space. The details behind Verge’s smart contracts and Nav’s Anon DApp platform are both still unclear so there could be differences between the two that I’m not aware of. But it still looks like they are going after the same market.

One major difference between the two is that Verge is relying on RSK to build out the smart contract capability while Nav is building everything in house. This is a double edged sword. On one hand this means Nav controls it’s own destiny but RSK has the advantage of being a full team dedicated to completing this.

Another difference is that Nav already has projects interested in their anon Dapp platform once they launch where Verge’s smart contracts doesn’t (at least from what I can tell).

Keep in mind that both Verge and Nav both have not publicly launched either one of these yet.

Another coin that is worth mentioning here is Pascal Coin. It currently has the ability to create smart contracts, assets and sub tokens via Layer-2. The reason why they are worth mentioning is because on their roadmap they plan to implement ZK-SNARKs, which will add a layer of privacy and anonymity. When this happens they will also have the ability to offer something similar to Nav.

Monero, Dash, Zcoin and other Anon Coins

All of these anon coins are worth mentioning as competitors because one of the biggest features Nav currently has is it’s dual blockchain tech that offers optional privacy on all payments. Although Nav does offer privacy/anonymity, it wants to (and will need to) find something else to pride itself on for it to grow.

I wouldn’t consider these coins direct competitors, but Nav is fighting for a chunk of the anon market share.

Coin Mixing Services

This category isn’t any specific coin, but any businesses out there providing coin mixing services are going to be in direct competition with Polymorph. Nav is going to have the advantage here though because these mixing services are mainly only for Bitcoin and with Nav’s partnership with Changelly it will be possible to mix any coin Changelly supports.

One of the biggest Bitcoin mixing websites, BitMixer, has recently shut down and has left a huge opening in the market. This could be the perfect time for Nav to come into the market.

Since all of this mixing will be done through Nav’s blockchain this will have a dramatic impact on the volume.

More volume = more transaction fees for stakers = more interest/demand for the coin

Final Thoughts Regarding Competitors

Nav is competing in a few different markets as of right now, but as more features from their roadmap get released Nav will begin to stand alone. Things such as Polymorph will differentiate Nav from any other coin and that is when we will begin to see the price begin to rise.

Investment Potential

As mentioned earlier, Nav is currently sitting around a $15 million dollar market cap. I think it is extremely undervalued. It has everything that you would want in a coin including active dev team, regular dev updates, full time devs, history of completing items on roadmap and an active community. However, the biggest thing Nav has going for it are the unique features that are planned such as Polymorph and Anon DApps. These two things could easily take the coin to $100 million market cap.

I’m estimating that we will see Nav with over a $100 million market cap within 6–12 months, which would be a 6x — 7x return on investment if you entered today. This isn’t investment advice, but that is my target.

Wrapping This All Up

Nav is one of my favorite coins right now and I think they are flying a bit under the radar considering everything discussed in this article. There is massive potential here with Polymorph and Anon DApp platform being developed.

If you’re looking for both a solid short term and long term investment then you might want to take a look into Nav.

Thank you all for reading my first coin investment article. I hope that you enjoyed it and found it useful. I’m planning on doing more of these on other coins that I am a fan of. If you’re interested in more write ups please let me know in the comments below!