Since the Nimiq Mainnet launch, we gained a lot of valuable insights from Nimiq operating live. Over the last few months, we made adjustments to meet the initial needs of the real world operation. Having reached a very stable ground-level, now it is time to revisit the greater technical roadmap in this post. Later on this week, we are planning to release our marketing strategy followed by our branding and styling guideline the week after. With these three publications in place, we want to provide a broad view on the future of Nimiq.

Important technical questions are: How to grow and scale Nimiq? What evolutionary aspects to focus on while keeping our Nimiq core values in mind? And what does our community desire?

A good moment for a quick recap.

What is the goal of Nimiq?

Nimiq set out to lower the barrier of entry to crypto, one of the most complex problems in our space. We want to offer a convenient way for the average internet user to get, interact, and pay with crypto. In short: Crypto made simple.

One question that might arise: Isn’t a centralized service such as Coinbase much more user-friendly?

While this is usually true from a UX perspective, any blockchain expert will agree that decentralization and censorship-resistance are the fundamental properties that make the key difference between our current banking system and the point of a real cryptocurrency. So the resulting challenge is: How can we raise awareness about the importance of decentralization and at the same time create decentralized interfaces that fit the user’s expectations and are equally usable.

How do we achieve our goal?

The problem of making secure systems usable is not new. A lot of developers and researchers have struggled with the concept of encryption, especially in the field of email encryption. Even nowadays, end-to-end encryption of emails is still very hard and almost exclusively done by people with deep technical understanding. In contrast to the failed example of encrypted emails, a technology that managed to bring end-to-end encryption to the masses is found in modern messengers. The key ingredients to make encryption usable for messengers certainly include the ability to have a level of control over the underlying protocol and some trade-offs in security when hiding the complexity from the user.

We imagine Nimiq moving in a similar direction: our protocol is tailored towards our use-case, being able to run nodes in the browser as nano-clients. And while having a fully decentralized blockchain underneath our UIs, we can sometimes introduce small centralized components to improve the user experience. One example could be an encrypted, centralized storage place for your contact book to easily sync it across devices. Of course, such centralized components need to be transparent, open source, and optional. This way we are able to maintain all our desired blockchain properties while offering better usability for the average user. In particular, we will not sacrifice being open for third-party services and censorship-resistant as Bitcoin while at the same time being reliable as independent, community-owned and driven blockchain.

Beyond this, we want to identify and implement applicable, proven research results to move along with the technical progress of the blockchain domain, most importantly concerning matters of scalability that remain one of the top challenges.

To turn this into a solid basis for our community to build an extensive Nimiq-based ecosystem on top, our approach will be based on implementing tools and entry points, writing documentation and providing demos.

Four Pillars: Wallet, Exchange, Payment, Blockchain

Our ultimate goal is to build the first complete and easy-to-use crypto payment system. Complete means encompassing the whole experience starting from owning fiat money, exchanging and using NIM, to also changing back to fiat. Easy-to-use means a simple and intuitive interface, a single flow solution.

In parallel, we are working intensively on empowering and supporting the community in building alternatives to our approaches in order to cater to the broad range of users with varying demands and wishes while also increasing the level of decentralization within the ecosystem.

The Four Pillars in Detail

Wallet

The Nimiq Safe is, first of all, an easy to use online-banking-like system running entirely on the user’s device, handling keys, transactions, and contacts. Additional novel features using blockchain specific characteristics such as multi-signature accounts will be added.

The components are:

Nimiq Safe UI

Simple and easy-to-use web UI

Dedicated native apps for mobile devices

Simple and easy-to-use web UI Dedicated native apps for mobile devices Cashlinks

Send NIM in a link for easy onboarding of new users

Send NIM in a link for easy onboarding of new users Nimiq Accounts Manager

Integrating hardware wallets and the Nimiq Keyguard

Integrating hardware wallets and the Nimiq Keyguard Nimiq Keyguard

A software wallet storing your keys securely in your browser

Exchange

We envision an API providing crypto-crypto exchanges at first and fiat-crypto later. Initially completely without any UI only to be integrated into apps. In the future, we might consider adding a minimalistic UI. Apart from that, we are going to assess whether it is preferable to develop our own approach and/or make use of external APIs from platforms such as agora.trade, Nimex or current centralized exchanges instead.

Payment

A system similar in ease-of-use to the PayPals and Venmos, maximized for convenience for both merchants and buyers while being decentralized and acting directly on the blockchain without the need for an intermediary.

The components are: