NKN (NKN)

NKN, which stands for ‘New Kind of Network’, aims to be a new type of P2P network connectivity protocol operating as the network infrastructure for a decentralized internet.

The reason for building this new protocol is that the current internet protocols must rely on third parties, where servers can be a single point of failure, vulnerable to DNS spoofing, DDOS attacks and server downtime. Internet services can also be denied, or the user data can be hacked.

NKN wants to become the 3rd pillar of the blockchain infrastructure where (1) Ethereum takes care of the decentralized computing, Filecoin/IPFS does the hosting via decentralized storage and (3) NKN provides decentralized networking.

NKN can be compared to Substratum and Ontology, two projects that are building a decentralized internet solution. One of the first applications being built on NKN is a Smart home IoT, A proof of concept for what the team calls the “Airbnb of the Future”, a decentralized sharing economy.

NKN introduces the idea of using Cellular Automata to reconstruct the network layer. The intrinsic characteristics of Cellular Automata such as decentralization, peer equivalence and concurrency enable us to build a truly decentralized blockchain network. DDTN combines multiple independent and self-organized relay nodes to provide clients with connectivity and data transmission capability. This coordination is decentralized and does not require trust of any involved parties. The secure operation of NKN is achieved through a consensus mechanism that coordinates and validates the operations performed by each node. DDTN provides a variety of strategies for decentralized application (DApp).

One of the NKN’s goals is to design and build networks that are decentralized while still being efficient in information transmission. This should be done by using a proper topology updating mechanism that considers both algorithm and incentive. On the algorithm side, neighbors should be sampled and chosen randomly; on the incentive side, reward for data transmission should be sublinear (grows slower than linear function) so thathubs are discouraged. Sparse random network is one possible topology that could be generated from such mechanism. It is decentralized and thus robust to the failure of any node, while still being efficient in routing due to its small network diameter

Nodes in blockchain are peers due to the decentralized nature of blockchain. The inherent lack of trust in blockchain systems is particularly noteworthy because any node can send any information to any nodes in the blockchain. Peers must evaluate information and make agreement on their actions for blockchain to work properly . NKN is designed to be a futuristic blockchain infrastructure that requires low latency, high bandwidth, extremely high scalability and low cost to reach consensus. These properties are crucial for future DApps. Thus, NKN needs new consensus algorithms that could satisfy such high requirements.

Consensus in NKN is driven by Proof of Relay (PoR), a useful Proof of Work (PoW) where the expected rewards a node gets depend on its network connectivity and data transmission power. Node proves its relay workload by adding digital signature when forwarding data, which is then accepted by the system through consensus algorithm. PoR is not a waste of resources since the work performed in PoR benefits the whole network by providing more transmission power. The “mining” is redefined as contributing to the data transmission layer, and the onlyonlyway to get more rewards is providing more transmission power. The competition between nodes in the network will eventually drive the system towards the direction of low latency, high bandwidth data transmission network. PoR is used for both token mining and transaction verification.

There are 4 core elements of NKN's public blockchain infrastructure: Decentralized Data Transmission Network (DDTN), Proof of Relay (PoR), blockchain consensus and incentive distribution mechanism. Together, these elements provide a highly reliable, secure, and scalable network blockchain platform.

• NKN’s maintains dynamic topology and routing based on Chord Distributed Hash Table for millions or even billions of nodes and clients, who can join and leave at any time. Unique NKN address is used to identify nodes, providing an overlay on top of TCP/IP.
• PoR uses signature chain as a proof of relay at all nodes along the network route. This allows a level of secure data transmission that is not only verifiable but also impossible to tamper with or forge.4
• NKN has designed a highly scalable consensus algorithm based on Cellular Automata concept and Ising model, and has applied it to next generation blockchain and peer-to-peer networking across millions of nodes.

NKN’s economic model provides token rewards to participants who relay the traffic for other users. These incentives should encourage the community to build and share the network with others.

Early 2019, the NKN team announced the token holders would have to swap their tokens from the NEP-5 token standard (NEO) to the ERC-20 token standard (Ethereum), the reason being to improve the liquidity as well as levering the larger Ethereum ecosystem.

Many leading blockchain projects sacrifice trust to improve performance. For example, EOS only has 21 full consensus nodes.

NKN's networking infrastructure enables application developers to build a fully decentralized Internet. With just a few clicks, an NKN full node can easily be set up from the AWS Marketplace by deploying a fully installed and configured NKN Full Node Virtual Machine.

More than 7000 nodes are currently running on the NKN testnet.

NKN recently transfered to its mainnet, and since the project isn't quite popular, it still has very few if any reputable wallets supporting the mainnet version of it token.

NKN wallet

The only safe bet is NKN's own web wallet, which has an easy to use interface which will get you up and ready in minutes. Find it here: https://wallet.nkn.org/wallet/create

Credit card and bank transfer options are fairly limited. We'd suggest you buy some ETH or BTC through Coinbase and then exchange it for NKN on either Binance or Bittrex.

Bittrex

Bittrex is a US based exchange founded in 2013 and headquartered in Seattle Washington. The company was founded by Bill Shihara, Richie Lai and Rami Kawach, all three previously worked at Microsoft.

A 0.25% flat commission is applied to all trades. Trading fees are slightly higher on Bittrex compared to the industry average. Additionally, there are neither rebates for higher-volume trades nor incentive models for takers and makers.

Binance

Binanace is the leading crypto to crypto exchange around with over 100 coins supported for deposit and withdrawal.

The exchange accepts users from around the world and has received favorable reviews from the crypto community. Recently the exchange has also partnered with Simplex to allow credit card purchases of cryptocurrencies at a premium.

 A flat rate of 0.1% is very lucrative fee for any trader who doesn’t need immediate fiat liquidation. Incredibly, it undercuts most other large exchanges, some of which charge upward of 0.2%. That’s a pretty sizeable difference if you’re working with large orders.