First week of the Nimiq Blockchain

… and the next weeks for Team Nimiq

Important note for NET Holders

As previously stated, NIM activations after the cut-off date require a manual process which will be performed sometime in the next month. Following activation, you will see the correct total amount of funds in the dashboard but your total amount of NIM will only appear in the Nimiq Safe once we processed any additional Activations since the cut-off.

Nimiq Mainnet was successfully launched and its source code published on Tuesday April 14 at 11:14 pm UTC, just 14 minutes later than intended, but reasonably on target given the complexity of the task. With this blog post, we want to share with the community what we’ve learned in the first few days of the Nimiq Blockchain being in “the wild” and our near-term plans based on that information.

Who mined the first blocks?

We did. The early blockchain would have been vulnerable to rebranching and forking due to the low difficulty of the first blocks that followed the Genesis Block. After careful and thorough analysis we decided that the safest option would be to “pre-mine” the first 720 Blocks using the burn address NQ07 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000.

Foundation Accounts

As established and promised by the creators, there are two accounts vesting over 10 years with 2% and 2.5% respectively of total final amount of NIM:

Nimiq Foundation supporting the long-term financing of the Nimiq project:

Contract Number: NQ09 VF5Y 1PKV MRM4 5LE1 55KV P6R2 GXYJ XYQF

Contract Account Balance: 525'000'000 NIM

Nimiq Charity supporting projects of high social and ecological impact:

Contract Number: NQ19 YG54 46TX EHGQ D2R2 V8XA JX84 UFG0 S0MC

Contract Account Balance: 420'000'000 NIM

Community Pools

Nimiq lowers barriers to entry for users as well as developers. Proof of that is the fact that there is already one mining pool in use and several additional ones are in the making by community members. We appreciate these efforts which not only confirm the level of interest in Nimiq from developers, but also exposes the codebase to further scrutiny.

The first pool available was developed by one of the most active community members. We would like to congratulate Azard — creator of Skypool — for his herculean effort of having Skypool online on time for the Nimiq Mainnet Launch.

With Skypool having been the only pool available, the hash power has been more centralized than it should be. Even though there are some solo miners with considerable amounts of hash power, Skypool continues to dominate the hash power distribution. Of course, this is not a solution for the longer term, not for Nimiq, nor for its users or Skypool itself.

We’ve been working on a fix for that.

Mining Pool Integration

Additional mining pools have been confirmed to be in their testing phase and are close to deployment as option within the Nimiq Ecosystem. They will have the following features:

Browser Miners: the Nimiq Mining Pool implementation will allow users to mine from their browser into a pool of their choice, thus receiving a steady reward instead of waiting to mine a Block themselves.

Node.js Miners: We will update our miners to a new version allowing users to select a pool by using the “-- pool” argument.

Developers: Everyone with the necessary skills will be able to run a mining pool with the aim that the network will benefit from a more even hashing power distribution.

Marketing

We believe it is important to start an awareness phase were we expose new users to our ecosystem in a progressive fashion. By iterating over our own ecosystem and fine-tuning it with the help of user feedback we will reach a more mature state of the Nimiq Ecosystem.

Empowering developers to run and promote their own mining pool is a first step to begin our marketing journey. We are still defining some details which we will communicate when they are settled.

We have completed our integration with the Ledger Nano S hardware wallet and are entering the approval process for the Ledger App store. We are planing a special promotion to spread the word as soon as this process has been successfully completed.

Exchanges

NIM is not listed in any exchange. We are looking to identify and connect with exchanges that — for the sake of Nimiq users — have the following characteristics:

Compatibility: Can handle tokens of standalone blockchain projects.

Safety: Known for investing efforts and resources into the security of their service to prevent DDoS attacks, downtimes and other hack attempts.

Liquidity: Nimiq users should be able to use NIM as easy as possible and the first step in that direction is to buy NIM. Exchanges with good liquidity are vital for this.

Responsibility: We have worked hard to comply with regulations and we expect exchanges to take this matter as serious as we do.

Next Steps

We are currently working on the following tasks:

Finishing up the implementation of additional Mining Pool integration and deploying it within the next days.

Updating the Nimiq Core documentation.

Updating the browser miner UI so that users can select a mining pool.

Releasing an easier to set up version of the Windows installer.

Monitoring and fine-tuning to ensure and improve network stability.

Meetings and research regarding a lot of non-technical decisions regarding the topics mentioned above.

We want to thank all of our users for their support in these first days of the Nimiq Blockchain.

Team Nimiq