March 31st, 2019; San Mateo, California

Today we are thrilled to announce the general release of NKN Mainnet V0.9 Beluga. With the entire networking and consensus subsystems fully verified after Meerkat, this release focuses on ledger and security enhancements. V0.9 Beluga is the last major release before our final Mainnet v1.0 Narwhal, scheduled for June 2019.

The main features released in Mainnet v0.9 Beluga include:

Change account model from UTXO to Balance Model

Change elliptic curve from ECDSA to Ed25519

NKN addresses will start with NKN instead of N

Use protobuf as blockchain data structure for better cross platform and cross version compatibility.

Remove the existence of unused fields in transactions.

https://github.com/nknorg/nkn/tree/v0.9

Due to major upgrades in both wallet format and blockchain data structure, we will not explicitly tag this release with v0.9 in our Github master branch. Instead, v0.9 Beluga is released and tested on the v0.9 branch and further development will be carried out on the balance-dev branch. We will keep running v0.8.x software on our large scale public testnet, so there is no interruption to testnet mining. We will merge the two branches into the final v1.0 Narwhal release, for a smooth Mainnet launch.

For those in our testnet community that would like to continue to run nodes and earn testnet tokens, there are not changes you need to make at this time. V0.8.x will continue to be the software branch for our public testnet. However, if you would like to try out the latest software and contribute to our development as we move toward our final mainnet release, please follow v0.9 Beluga software branch on Github. The v0.9 branch might reset chain data at any time.

For more details about our Mainnet launch plan, please refer to the following article:

About NKN

NKN is the new kind of P2P network connectivity protocol & ecosystem powered by a novel public blockchain. We use economic incentives to motivate Internet users to share network connection and utilize unused bandwidth. NKN’s open, efficient, and robust networking infrastructure enables application developers to build the decentralized Internet so everyone can enjoy secure, low cost, and universally accessible connectivity.

Home: https://nkn.org/

Email: contact@nkn.org

Telegram: https://t.me/nknorg

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NKN_ORG

Forum: https://forum.nkn.org

Medium: https://medium.com/nknetwork

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nknetwork/

Github: https://github.com/nknorg

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/nknblockchain

Discord: https://discord.gg/yVCWmkC

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/c/NKNORG