Project Introduction
NKN: Network Infra for Decentralized Internet
NKN is the new kind of P2P network connectivity protocol & ecosystem powered by a novel public blockchain. NKN uses economic incentives to motivate Internet users to share network connection and utilize unused bandwidth to provide a decentralized data transmission network that can be used to build applications that requires real time data transmission, message delivery, content distribution, etc. NKN's open, efficient, and robust network infrastructure enables application developers to build the decentralized Internet so everyone can enjoy secure, low cost, and universally accessible connectivity.
Dr. Whitfield Diffie is one of NKN technical advisors. He is one of the inventors of Public Key Cryptography (Diffie-Hellman), and 2015 Turing Award winner. Dr. Stephen Wolfram, another technical advisor of NKN, is the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, author of “A New Kind of Science” and pioneer researcher of Cellular Automata (CA). NKN’s novel Majority vOte Cellular Automata (MOCA) consensus algorithm is the first consensus algorithm based on Cellular Automata. MOCA is extremely efficient and horizontal scalable: it can achieve global consensus for millions or even billions of nodes in just a few seconds with neglectable resource utilization. MOCA has been extensively tested in NKN’s open testnet with more than 10,000 full consensus nodes globally from more than 50 countries for almost a year.
The main use cases for NKN are networking focused applications. For example: nCDN (new kind of Content Delivery Network) for faster video streaming; PubSub for chat/IM, IoT data streaming and control, real-time price info.
NKN advantages:
● Global Coverage: up to 10,000 global servers now, projected to reach 25,000 - 30,000 nodes globally by the end of 2019.
● Low Latency: there is always a few NKN nodes close to the clients with low latency.
● Low cost: community run NKN servers, whose fixed monthly costs have already been covered by NKN mining economy. And additional revenue from running value added services will be pure profit for the miners.
● Elastic Capacity: leverage unused capacity since NKN servers are multi-functional, that can scale up and down depending on demand.
● Advanced routing: can dynamically route traffic based on many parameters: bandwidth, latency, server load, and price.
● Reliability: compared to centralized systems, NKN network has no single point of failure and is fully distributed.
● Security and privacy: support both end-to-end and hop-by-hop encryption, without the need of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) or 3rd party Certificate Authority (CA)
Token Info and Release Schedule
● Investors: 35% (All vested and circulating)
● Developer: 18% (Will be vested over 3 years, 1 year cliff)
● Foundation: 17% (Will be vested over 3 years, 1 year cliff)
● Miners: 30% (Will be mined over the 25 years after the mainnet)
NKN mining token generation (Millions)/Time (year)
The total supply of NKN token is 1 billion, out of which:
● 700M were created at genesis
○ 350M were sold to investors
■ 250M were sold to private investors, primarily institutions
■ 100M were sold to public investors
○ 170M were reserved for NKN Foundation
■ Locked for first 12 months
■ then released 1/3 every year over the next 3 years. (first release May 28th, 2019, 2nd release May 28th, 2020, 3rd release May 28th, 2021)
○ 180M were reserved for Developers/Team
■ Release schedule is the same as NKN Foundation
● 300M are future mineable AFTER the mainnet is online (estimate June’2019)
○ Not in circulation yet
NKN Roadmap
● MVP: May’2018.
○ MVP of DDTN, PoR and CA consensus subsystems
○ Build the basic blockchain infrastructure of NKN
● TestNet
○ V0.1 “Firefox” release: June’16, 2018.
■ First live testnet over global nodes with all core subsystems working together, GUI and dMessenger demo.
■ Preview of SDK for dAPP experiments
○ V0.3 “Lemur” release: August’31, 2018.
■ Optimizing scalability and efficiency, SDK alpha release
■ Testnet is now public for anyone to participate
○ V0.5: “Koala” release, October’30, 2018.
■ Enhancing attack resistance, larger scale testnet, SDK Beta release
○ V0.7: “Meerkat” release, Jan’18, 2019.
■ Full featured testnet with complete implementation and performance, SDK v1.0 release
○ V0.9 “Beluga” release: March‘31, 2019,
■ Mainnet preview
■ Develop network-intensive dApps (nCDN & Pub/Sub etc)
● MainNet
○ V1.0 “Narwhal” release: June, 2019
■ Launch NKN MainNet
■ Launch NKN flagship products (nCDN & Pub/Sub)
■ Launch NKN ecosystem
Project Links
Home: https://nkn.org/
Forum: https://forum.nkn.org
Telegram: https://t.me/nknorg
Discord: https://discord.gg/yVCWmkC
Twitter: https://twitter.com/NKN_ORG
Github: https://github.com/nknorg
Overview presentation: https://www.nkn.org/static/doc/NewKindofNetwork_EN.pdf