The path to the release of NavCoin Core 6.0 — bringing NAV back to the spotlight

We’ve been working hard to get everything ready for the NavCoin Core 6.0 release. The set of changes included in this release make it probably the biggest and most important release in NavCoin’s history. This new version includes two major protocol updates. xNAV is our new private token, bringing back to NavCoin the long awaited privacy protocol. A technical description of blsCT, the underlying protocol which makes xNAV possible, is to read here. A second protocol upgrade labelled as “Exclude Blocks” will also be introduced. This upgrade will protect the NavCoin DAO voting quorums in the case an exchange would decide to enable staking for NAV. You can read more about this upgrade proposal here. This is not the only new features coming out, but other changes are also included, like full wallet encryption. You can read the whole list of changes here in the release notes. With more than 850,000 new lines of code added, ensuring the quality of the changes introduced has been a priority for us. We’ve put our focus during the last months on battle testing the new features. For this, we’ve introduced the xNAV Testing Bounty program. We saw new members joining, helping in the process and reporting the bugs they’ve found — we are very thankful for it!

After activation on the test network, the current supply of private coins is 4,187,466.71 xNAV. In the last month, we’ve seen 7,402,043.35 NAV swapped to xNAV, and more than 3,217,851.802 xNAV were swapped back to NAV. A total of 3,410.468 xNAV have been accumulated from staking rewards during that period, and we’ve seen 6,985 transactions involving xNAV. Our nodes running the code with the new features have shown to perform stable without issues for weeks now both in testnet and mainnet.

Today, we are ready to announce more details about the release schedule of NavCoin Core 6.0 and the voting/activation schedule of the different protocol upgrades included, which will kick start on January 1st, 2021:

• January 1st, 2021: We will publish NavCoin Core 6.0-rc, the release candidate binaries. The whole community is invited to start running the binaries on the mainnet network starting from that date.
• January 15th, 2021: If no technical issues are found with the release candidate version, in this date the final version and announcement with the binaries will be released.
• February 1st, 2021: The DAO voting for the activation of xNAV and Exclude Blocks will start.

The new NavCoin Core 6.0 will vote “YES” by default to both the xNAV and Exclude Blocks upgrade. If you wish to change your vote for any of the proposals you will be able to do it introducing the following entries in your navcoin.conf file:

For voting no to xNAV:

rejectversionbit=10

For voting no to Exclude Blocks:

rejectversionbit=12

Once a majority of 75% of the staked blocks signal a positive vote for any of the protocol upgrade proposals during a period of 20160 blocks, such upgrade will get locked in. When reaching the state, every node MUST upgrade to NavCoin Core 6.0. 20160 blocks after the block where any upgrade is locked in, the new protocol will come into effect and every node running an older version will stop staking and accepting new blocks. Nodes upgraded which voted no for any activated change, will still continue to function normally and accept the new consensus rules.

In no case the activation would happen before the 15th of February. The concrete date will depend on how fast the network upgrades and the count of positive votes each of the changes is able to get. Once a new consensus rule gets locked in, we will announce it through our communication channels.

We are getting closer, privacy is almost back.

Get ready for the launch!

Your NavCoin Core team.