What does the NKNx — Ecosystem cost?

Christian Busch
Nov 6 · 3 min read

We often hear people in the community ask us how to help contributing to NKNx projects without knowing anything about programming or the NKN blockchain at all. Because of that we recently created a NKN wallet address where you can support us on the financial side.

We as a team think it is really important to know for everyone contributing in that way where that money goes to — especially after we won the NKN special community award. Because of that we wrote down a comprehensive list of all services we’re working on and how much costs they produce.

I: What’s the NKNx — Ecosystem?

The NKNx — Ecosystem consists of 3 different layers:

  1. Apps for end users
    As a day-to-day “NKN-ian” you probably know these guys:

    https://nknx.org — a smart wallet and node tracker
    https://vault.nknx.org — the NKN desktop wallet
    https://explorer.nknx.org — the official NKN blockchain explorer
  2. Data Providers and helpers for developers
    Every app needs its data. And that comes from different services:

    https://api.nknx.org — Big data storage and logic server. Here the whole NKN Blockchain is stored in a postgres database and a powerful PHP backend adds some logic.
    https://price.nknx.org — the NKN price service. It regularly gets the latest price in USD and ETH from Coinmarketcap and stores it in a database
    Node geolocation service — not public. Gets a list of all IPs in the NKN network and locates their position.
  3. Supporting services for development work
    These services are 3rd party services that make our developer-lives easy.

    https://forge.laravel.com/ — Used for easy deployment of all services
    https://ipgeolocation.io/ — For locating IPs all around the globe
    https://www.sparkpost.com/ — easy email sending without a hassle

You see: when you’re a “normal” user you probably just see the tip of the iceberg NKNx grew to in the last year.

II: The Costs

Now to the hardest part: costs. After we showed you all the services NKNx got it is clear that we don’t get this whole ecosystem for free. Besides 3rd party providers there are also server costs to cover.

That leads to following monthly bill:

Server Hosting (DigitalOcean)

  • 1x 1GB, 1vCPU, 50GB HDD for 5$/month (geolocation)
  • 2x 2GB, 1vCPU, 50GB HDD for 10$/month (frontend & price)

Sum of Server costs per month: 25$

Note: our API server is currently sponsored by an awesome person — that’s why it is not on our billing. Else that would add:

  • 1x 16GB,6vCPU, 320GB HDD for 80$/month (api.nknx.org)

3rd-party services

Sum of 3rd-party services: 43$

All in all the whole NKNx ecosystem costs us 68$ per month.

III: WHY???

Short answer — we’re crazy and love what we do — regardless of costs ;)

Long answer — Christian did a really good article on how to set up a NKN miner on digitalocean. Because of our great community (yeah, that’s you, guys!) we got ourselves a solid amount of free credit due to referral bonus, so our server costs are payed for the end of the year.

IV: What are you gonna do with my donations?

First - we will use your donations for covering the server costs at least for one year. The remaining donations will be taken for developing and expanding our infrastructure and products.

If – and only IF all the above things are covered we will think about giving us a little bit of compensation – having something to eat is always something good ;)

We hope we gave you a good overview about the NKNx ecosystem and hope our projects help the whole community going forward.

Our Donation address is now available for NKN Mainnet Tokens and shown in the footer of all our products: NKNXXXXXGKct2cZuhSGW6xqiqeFVd5nJtAzg

If there is anything you want to know just ask – we would like to hear your opportunity as well!

Yours,

NKNx-Team (Andrew and Christian)

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