[2023] April Updates
Greetings Navigators.
This month has seen quite the increase in people joining our mission so here’s a warm welcome to all the new recruits.
One of the reasons for the newcomer influx has been the announcement of the Private Finance Syndicate. Co-founded by Navcoin and LunarDAO, this alliance brings various PriFi projects and intends, through joint efforts, to educate individuals on the importance of privacy, unite communities, and tackle regulatory challenges. By working together, the hope is to expand the outreach to like-minded individuals who share the same conviction, as we’re firm believers that a larger community can make a more meaningful impact. In concrete terms, you can get excited for the PFS online conference later this year. More on that in the coming weeks.
If you remember last month’s cliffhanger, it was an excerpt from the syndicate’s manifesto. We now invite you to read the full text and grasp the scope of what is at stake.
Data — The Oil of The 21st Century
Financial data, as any data, represents powerful knowledge about an individual. Cash as the main means of transaction has been in decline for some time. Most transactions are conducted electronically, there is more electronic FIAT money than FIAT cash, every banking transaction is logged, stored by central entities, and made available to the government agencies and regulators of the world, making it possible for the powers in place to sanction and limit the financial activity of individuals. Cryptocurrencies are meant to represent a glimpse of hope in that regard, however, they come with underestimated side effects in terms of privacy.
The second catalyst for our community growth has been the MEXC listing. The NAV/USDT pair is now available for you to sell your dirty fiat for censorship resistant crypto. Although we believe that decentralized exchanges are more forward-thinking than centralized ones, we acknowledge the importance of meeting people where they are and educating them. We look forward to welcoming many new users who will learn and convert to embracing our perspective.
In preparation for the switch to the PePoS chain, anquii released the first version of a new Swift library for macOS and iOS. This version (v0.1.0) comes with the ability to serialize and deserialize transactions, based on the specifications outlined in https://docs.navcoin.org/serialization. This means that developers will be able to build apps for our new private chain with greater ease.
The set membership proof, which is the primary cryptographic primitive used in PePoS, has been successfully implemented in the new core by gogoex. This technique enables a verifier to confirm if a particular element is part of a set without disclosing any information about the other elements in the set. In simpler terms, this will allow stakers to participate in the consensus system without revealing their identity.
We keep a close eye on the conversations in our Telegram and Discord channels and value the feedback we get. This time someone suggested the removal of the Google Tag Manager from our website. As we take data privacy very seriously, we swiftly removed the tracker. Keep the recommendations coming.
And a bright piece of news to end on: Tornado Cash developer Alex Pertsev has been released on bail. While it’s undoubtedly outrageous that he was imprisoned in the first place, at least he can now fight these unjust allegations from the safety of his own home.
Until the next one. Cheers!
