Cryptocurrency Code Review: NKN

Disclaimer: These reviews are done as is from what is on display in the master branch of the repo’s made available. This review is not a comment on the overall project, scope, or success thereof. This was done as an educational review by me and any comments in the article are simply my opinion. It should not be used as any comment or advice on the project as a whole.

Review Date: 23/03/2018

EDIT 27/03/2018

Hi, Andre， I am co-founder of NKN, Justin Wang. Some clarifications here.

To those who may have concern on the code history from ft-blockchain,

1. The ft-blockchain code in NKN repo is based on DNA which is an incentived forum demo code and is NOT core purpose of NKN project.
2. DNA complaints with APACHE license that by design permits anyone to reuse the code and create derivative products almost under any license, ranging from copyright to proprietary.
3. The founder of NKN Yanbo Li, is the only maintainer for DNA . He is also the 1st and major code contributors for DNA. https://github.com/DNAProject/DNA/graphs/contributors
4. The core code of NKN (nkn-core repo) is still under development and will open to public soon. NKN team want to guarantee the framework and main direction of nkn-core development.

B.R.

Justin Wang

Me: So the core code is not yet available as open source and DNA and NKN have a soft relationship via Yanbo Li as the maintainer for DNA, all cleared up ;)

** Original article follows

Fortunetree (the incentive forum) and ft-blockchain look to be the interesting ones, docs are just whitepapers and nkn-site is just the website.

Looking at this, I thought that it looked very familiar, I couldn’t place it, but I had seen this somewhere before.

Oh right, DNA project, but I still remember something else

Right, Elastos. So who am I reviewing currently? I am reviewing Elastos? DNA Project? NKN? None of these are forks of each other? So which one was first? I don’t know.

So it definitely wasn’t Elastos, but way to go giving credit where it was due. At least NKN copied over the commit history. Which by the way gives us;

So DNA Project was the first. So I guess today we are reviewing DNA Project and not NKN or Elastos. The state of this industry is ridiculous, how can we copy and plagiarize this much from each other and call it our own?

DNA project looks like it stopped in Dec 6, 2017, let’s see what NKN has changed since then.

Massive project rename from DNA to FT.

Ok, so the repo contributors changed around that August 8 mark, so we can assume they forked it then, let’s see what they changed since.

Ok, so some good code leading up to the rebrand which I’m ignoring since I don’t know who the contributors were, and then since the rebrand no new code additions.

Conclusion: Is NKN DNA Project? Are they rebranding? This code is just DNA project code without anything changed? And where does Elastos come in on all of this?

For a DNA Project code review, go read my Elastos code review, since what I thought was Elastos was actually DNA Project apparently.