It’s been another busy month for NavCoin as 4.7.0 Purple Zebra hits the shelves, the first developer roundtable takes place and the marketing discussions get underway.

NavCoin Core 4.7.0 — Purple Zebra

The latest version of NavCoin Core is now available for download.

Purple Zebra is the culmination of the last few months of work on NavCoin Core and includes 40 closed pull requests, many new features and important security updates & stability fixes. Due to the security patches, upgrading to Purple Zebra should be considered mandatory and performed as soon as possible, especially if you are staking.

One of the key stability fixes was to migrate the database which stores the Community Fund data from being in its own stand alone database to be merged with the rest of the CoinsDB. This both increases performance and mitigates data consistency issues that was causing some users to reject valid blocks where their Community Fund data was incorrect.

There are a lot of other fixes and user experience improvements added to the latest release including a sync progress dialog and the error log now being available in the debug window of NavCoin-QT.

To check out the release notice please visit the NavCoin 4.7.0 Notice.

For the full release notes visit the Purple Zebra Release on GitHub.

To download the NavCoin Purple Zebra visit the Wallet Downloads page.

Developer Roundtables

NavCoin Developer aguycalled has instigated a monthly NavCoin Developer Roundtable to help connect developers and share project progress. These meetings are happening on the 3rd Monday of the month @ 7PM GMT, two weeks after the community roundtable.

The first Developer Roundtable was held this week where aguycalled gave an in depth overview of where he is at with the research of NavCoin’s latest privacy protocol. The main goal of any privacy protocol should be to complete two basic objectives; disconnect the sending address from the receiving address, and hide the transaction amounts so sender and receiver cannot be linked by inference.

So far aguycalled is investigating the use of BLS signatures to compress and combine transactions signatures to effectively disconnect the sender from the receiver, then introducing Bulletproofs (Confidential Transactions) to hide the amounts. It’s an interesting line of research and combined with a few other protocols like Dandelion routing and the use of Stealth Addresses, could provide a very high level of privacy.

More research is needed before this can be confirmed as a viable approach but as always it is good to see forward thinking research being done with the intention of improving the NavCoin protocols.

While the core focus of the roundtables is on NavCoin Core development, NavCoin Developers come in all shapes and sizes and there’s a lot of projects going on throughout the community. If you’re a developer working on something related to NavCoin, or you want to join the efforts, or even if you’re not a developer and just want to join the conversation, make sure you attend the next NavCoin Developer Roundtable on 21 October 2019 @ 7PM GMT.

Read the discussion on Discord channel #dev-roundtable.

Marketing Discussions

After being introduced during the Community Roundtable at the beginning of the month sundaybrunch, salmonskinroll and proletesseract have had two meetings to jump start the marketing conversations.

The main piece of work that’s being concentrated on initially is defining the user types which we are wanting to communicate with, then figuring out what drives them and how we can connect to that audience. A public Trello board has been setup where we are collaboratively mapping out the different types of users who make up the NavCoin community, what their interests and traits are and how we might be able to reach them.

The main user groups have been narrowed down to developers and stakers. The assumption is that with a bigger base of developers and stakers more progress will be made within the project and that will in turn attract more of the other user types like businesses and spenders.

Currently some community surveys are being developed to help give us some insight into what types of developers and stakers the project has attracted so far to see if we can use that information to connect with more similar people.

If you want to get involved in the marketing meetings, you can join the Discord channel #marketing. We are currently meeting most weeks on a Wednesday @ 9PM GMT.

If you would like to join the Trello boards and help with any other marketing activities like writing Social Posts or planning advertising campaigns, then feel free to join the team here: https://trello.com/navcoin

Exscudo Exchange Listing & Channels Integration

NavCoin Contributor Nio has been working hard to get NavCoin listed on the Exscudo platform. His latest efforts lead to NavCoin being included in a listing competition within their Channels application. NavCoin ended the listing competition in second place which means NAV will be listed on Exscudo.

Exscudo is a “nextgen financial ecosystem” which is centered around their exchange platform, trading terminal and channels application.

The exchange itself supports more than 50 cryptocurrencies and includes three fiat currencies — EUR, USD and JPY. Fiat deposits and withdrawals are available to accounts which undergo KYC/AML verification.

The trading terminal is a desktop application which has been developed by their team of professional traders to suit the needs of professional traders.

Channels bundles a lot of features into a simple to use application. Primarily it is a multi-crypto wallet for your mobile phone, but it also has encrypted chat and a social network where you can broadcast messages to your followers. The chat app is deeply integrated with the cryptocurrency wallet, so you can send payments to other users directly in chat and participate in airdrops and other giveaways directly in the wallet.

Exscudo is definitely an interesting ecosystem to be a part of and its always great to have more fiat on/off ramps for NavCoin. NAV trading pairs are expected to be added within the next month.

https://exscudo.com

Magnum Wallet Staking

Since being included in Magnum Wallet last month NavCoin Contributor Juguelio has been working with the Magnum Wallet team to enable staking in their wallet. We are pleased to report that Magnum have finished the integration and you can now stake NAV using their wallet.

If you haven’t tried Magnum yet, head over to their website and check it out.

https://magnumwallet.co

Community Fund Update

There is currently 98,760 NAV available in the community fund with 3 pending proposals and 1 pending payment requests actively being voted on.

Proposals

Video Tutorial Series (25,000 NAV)

NavCoin Content Creator Colvano (ex NavTechServers) has put forward a proposal to fund a new video tutorial series (11 videos) about NavCoin to be published to YouTube and the Knowledge Base.

View the proposal on NavExplorer »

NavCoin Brand Coloured Spray Paint (800 NAV)

A NavCoin Community Member wants to purchase NavCoin brand coloured spray paint and tag the NavCoin logo in public bathrooms throughout Oslo.

View the proposal on NavExplorer »

Payment Requests

Monthly Community News (15,000 NAV)

Payment for 3 months of writing the monthly news, social posts and roundtable write ups.

View the request on NavExplorer »

+ More on NavExplorer

To check out the full list of proposals and payment requests, visit the community fund page of the block explorer.

https://www.navexplorer.com/community-fund

And remember, anyone can submit a funding proposal which gets voted on by the network. To learn more about how the community fund works and kickstart your next crypto project, head on over to the NavCoin Community Fund page.

https://navcoin.org/en/community-fund

That’s all for this month. Don’t forget that you can receive the monthly news by email. If you would like to be added to the mailing list, please sign up here.

And if you want your project included in the community news, jump on the NavCoin Discord and post it to the #monthly-update channel.

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