NavCoin - Next steps for NavCoin Core

Next Steps for NavCoin Core

The testing of the claims process for the Community Fund is largely completed and the final pieces of this puzzle are falling into place for the fund’s launch on the mainnet. There’s still a few things the Core Team and community are working on to line up for the launch and also set up for future development of the NavCoin protocol.

NavCoin Core are working with Prodpeak from NavExplorer.com to build the tools necessary to create, browse and vote on proposals. NavCoin Core are working on a full redesign of the NavCoin.org website which will better explain NavCoin’s eco-system and how to get involved in the Community Fund. We’re also launching a separate website which will be a collaborative workspace for teams working on proposals. We are aiming to get these last pieces ready within the next 4 weeks to coincide with the mainnet launch of the Community Fund claims mechanism.

The Content Team are also shooting a video to promote the Community Fund in early October which we hope to have released soon after the launch of the Community Fund on the mainnet.

There’s quite a lot going on, so I want to talk through our plans for the next few releases of NavCoin Core so you can understand what is happening when and how it fits into the mid-term game plan.

NavCoin Core 4.4.0 — Community Fund

NavCoin 4.4.0 is planned to contain 3 soft forks which can be individually signalled but will be automatically signalling yes in the new version. We are expecting to publish v4.4.0 about 4 weeks from now.

Version Bit 6

This version bit signals for the soft fork to activate the claims mechanism for the Community Fund. You can read more about the NavCoin Community Fund on the NavCoin website.

Version Bit 14

This version bit signals for the soft fork to activate NPIP0003. This is largely a technical improvement which consolidates mined Community Fund contributions to every 500th block instead of every block to reduce blockchain bloat. You can read more about NPIP0003 on the NPIP GitHub.

Version Bit 16

This version bit signals for the soft fork to increase the Community Fund contribution from 0.25 NAV to 0.50 NAV per block. The reason why we’re proposing to increase the Community Fund to 0.50 NAV is partly due to the current price of NAV being quite low and secondly to retain the 80:20 ratio we originally intended with the fund when after NPIP0004 switches mining to a static block reward of 2 NAV per block. You can read more about NPIP0004 on my Reddit post.

TL;DR

With a fixed block reward of 2 NAV and 0.5 NAV to the Community Fund, overall inflation will be around 4.17% per annum and exponentially deflating. Mining rewards would be as high as 10.5% per annum with the current network weight but will more realistically be around 5% once more miners start up.

Rationale

We think it’s best to bundle these three soft forks together into a single wallet version since they are all to do with the Community Fund. We also don’t want to release soft forks too frequently because they become mandatory updates once locked in.

If you disagree with all of these, simply don’t upgrade to 4.4.0, or if you disagree with one of these proposals you are able to turn off the particular version bit you disagree with.

NavCoin Core 4.5.0 — PoSv3

NavCoin 4.5.0 is planned to contain 2 soft forks which again can be individually signalled but will be automatically signalling yes in the new version. We are expecting to publish v4.5.0 about 4 weeks after v4.4.0 is published.

We are conscious of trying to find a balance between having too many consensus changes voted on simultaneously and releasing too many wallet versions for people to keep up with. We are hoping 4 weeks between these version gives everyone enough time to be informed and update.

Version Bit 15

This version bit signals for the soft fork to activate NPIP0004. This change will modify the staking mechanism for NavCoin to be a static reward of 2 NAV per block instead of a percentage based on coinage. You can read more about NPIP0004 on the NPIP GitHub or further discussion and rationale is posted to this reddit thread.

Version Bit 4

This version bit signals for the soft fork to activate NPIP0002. This change will allow for Cold Staking addresses to be created and for seperate spending and staking keys to be used on hot or cold wallets. You can read more about NPIP0002 on the NPIP GitHub.

Rationale

These two soft forks will bring NavCoin’s consensus protocol to be inline with the PoSv3 spec as outlined by Blackcoin. It makes sense to group these two consensus updates together.

Again you can choose to (or not) support any or all of these by signalling yes or no on the correct version bit once NavCoin Core v4.5.0 is released.

NavCoin Core 5.0.0 — Privacy Upgrade

With the Community Fund development finished, the main protocol development focus of the NavCoin Core developers will be on upgrading NavCoin’s privacy capabilities. Alex posted about this on Reddit a couple of days ago, so head over there if you want to join the discussion.

NavCoin’s previous privacy solution NavTech was an innovative solution when it was released in 2015, but there have been many innovations in private transactions since then. Instead of sinking time into solving some of the inherent issues which NavTech faces, the NavCoin Core developers have planned a solution to bring the privacy on-chain to make it trustless, decentralised and without reliance on a third party.

As always, we are committed to being innovators in the cryptocurrency space and our solution is not simply copying and pasting some lines of code from another project. We have taken the time to survey the privacy space, sort the good from the bad and come forward with our own solution that uses tried and tested fundamentals but is unique, innovative all while still being simple to use.

More details about NavCoin’s new privacy solution will be released when we get closer to releasing the alpha build on the testnet. Integrating the new features and thoroughly testing it will require some effort, it might take us a couple of months at least to get the alpha ready. Privacy is one of the core principals of NavCoin’s manifesto and the Core Team will be dedicating our efforts to making NavCoin’s privacy available again.

One thing to note is that the privacy solution we’ve designed has a prerequisite that NavCoin’s consensus protocol is PoSv3 compliant. So it’s important to make these changes in the correct order so they can all be smoothly deployed when ready.

What's Next?

After the new privacy solution is deployed, the NavCoin Core team will be focused on continuing the Kauri Wallet build which will then unlock a lot of the roadmap’s upcoming projects for development like the Kauri DAEx and NavMorph. It will also allow us the space to commence work on the Alpha build of the Valence Platform.

With the community fund active we also hope to see a lot more projects from other dev teams and community members get added to the community roadmap in the near future.

Personally I’m excited to see what plays out over the next months as all the community’s hard work comes to fruition.