The Nimiq Discord Update — Week 9

Welcome to the Nimiq Discord Update! This a community contributed weekly write-up on what Team Nimiq have been posting in the official Nimiq discord channel alongside community led projects and content being created for Nimiq.

Strengthening the network

Week 9 brings a raft of updates from the team about the pending improvements to the Nimiq network. The update will see a greater number of seed nodes deployed to support the increasing demand ‘dumb’ nodes have had on the network, this will result in users experiencing a more consistent and improved experience when connecting to the Nimiq network.

Following on from the deployment of the seed nodes, the team has announced its intent to rewrite the current Node.js in Rust to optimise performance and security. The rewrite will result in greater parity between the performance of browser-based and backbone miners, enable multi-threading which is currently not possible server side with Node.js and further increasing the number of RPS (Responses per second) being handled. More on information on Node.js vs Rust can be found here.

Ever wonder why you can’t reach consensus in the Nimiq safe? Poolwatch.info created and managed by community member Brantje has created a page to monitor the initial 8 seed nodes deployed by the team.

Marketing (Plans, Strategy & Design)

Following the official blog post by Team Nimiq on the marketing strategy moving forward found here, it has been confirmed by Nimiq developer Soren that work is currently being conducted on a variant of the widely popular beta-net feature of cashlinks. Exchanges remain a priority with HitBTC set to list Nimiq in the near future with testing being conducted.

As a reminder Team Nimiq “plan on considering larger scale and more classic means of marketing in sync with advances in network performance”. With the recent network performance issues and the planned fixes for them, it would be reasonable to tether expectations for wide spread marketing with the strengthening of the network.

Exchanges (Listing & Discussion)

[No change] Mentioned in week 7's edition, Nimiq has officially listed on ‘Tradesatoshi’ as the first exchange to integrate NIM, there have been issues with regards to withdrawals so caution is advised.

tradesatoshi.com/Exchange/?market=NIM_BTC

As mentioned in the previous section, Nimiq is set to list on HitBTC with integration in progress. HitBTC by 24 hour volume is consistently in the top 10 cryptocurrency exchanges in the world with a consistent 24 hour volume above $100 million everyday. Another exchange that Nimiq is set to list on is LAToken, a smaller exchange with a 24 hour volume of approximately $6 million.

The Nimex.app exchange remains invite only but a reliable way to exchange NIM with ETH, feedback has largely been positive and the developers have maintained fast response rates to any problems encountered by users. Volume on Nimex has remained relatively subdued. Join the Nimex discord here.

Mining (Pools & Developments)

poolwatch.info

Peaking at 909.8 MH/s on the 17th of June with a low 523.7 MH/s on the 22nd, the global hashrate has reached an equilibrium with an average weekly hashrate at an estimated 700 MH/s. The network remains skewed toward centralisation with the top two pools Beeppool and Skypool taking up the lion-share of the global hashrate.

nimiq.watch/#chart-hashing-distribution

Want to help the hashrate distribution effort? I’ve compiled a list of mining pools you can join in a previous post.

Trading & Price (Transaction volume & Capitalisation)

tradesatoshi.com/Exchange/?market=NIM_BTC

The orderbook for Tradesatoshi puts the nominal value of Nimiq somewhere between $0.005–0.0075 per NIM. A fall from 85~ satoshi’s from last week. Nimiq transaction volume has reached a new ATH with the amount being traded between users up approximately 25% from last week (This excludes the periods when the Nimiq team have activated NET to NIM).

Optimisation by miners to increase efficiencies have put the break-even price for mining Nimiq at approximately $0.0045 with large scale miners seeing a break-even closer to $0.002.

The entire cryptocurrency market is currently experiencing a bear market with the total market capitalisation at $258,878,567,596 down from $267,076,546,959 1 week ago according to CoinMarketCap.

Community (App development & Announcements)

nimiq-shop.herokuapp is a web shop demo developed by community member RLaFranchi to show case the potential of having Nimiq as a built-in payment protocol:

“I’ve been working on some hobby projects revolved around Nimiq. I wanted to share a demo with you for a digital goods web shop that accepts Nimiq…I have found that the best way to learn something is to just dig right in. I wanted to integrate Nimiq with libraries I’m already familiar with — a Vue.js frontend and Ruby on Rails backend. I plan to write about it as somewhat of a technical how to and have it be more geared towards Vue and/or Ruby developers, but where Nimiq is a highlight as alternative payment option as something like Stripe or PayPal.” — RLaFranchi

Price.Nimiqx developed by Miao has expanded to including Fiat to NIM conversions for Nimiq.

Nimipet has released notes on upcoming updates to the game (?). They will be introducing styles, a CPU slider, an updated leaderboard and Nimipet marketplace.

Nimiqgames.ca developed by community members Ben and Doolan uses Nimiq as a currency to play dice games with non-gambling games planned for the future: (Remember to gamble responsibly)

“ Hey everyone. @ben and I have been working on a project to see how a coin like Nimiq could be used to run a gaming website. We’ve been working hard the past few months, and we’re very eager to go live, so we’re introducing the Beta here today. I hope you guys will check it out, and we’re open to suggestions and questions either here on discord or through our contact email contact@nimiqgames.ca” — Doolan

If you’d like your community update added to the next post please contact me through the comments or @Symphonys on the Nimiq Discord!