A Reintroduction to NavCoin

As we reach the end of 2020, we’d like to take the opportunity to recount everything we’ve achieved so far and look back on not just this year but on the entire NavCoin journey up until this point. There is a lot going on within the NavCoin ecosystem with significant developments and launches coming shortly. As a result, we’d like to keep our existing community members updated as well as give all new, incoming members to the community a good overview of where NavCoin has been, and exactly where we are going.

The Early Days

As one of the most established projects in the cryptocurrency space, NavCoin goes all the way back to May 2014 and was originally known as “SummerCoin”. However, the fast-changing nature of the cryptosphere saw a new development team take over the project and rebrand it to NavajoCoin in July of the same year. This was followed by a fork and further rebranding in 2016 which took place in order to keep the network technically advanced, and saw the project become known as NavCoin.

It’s important to note that there was no pre-mine or ICO in 2014 with mining on the SummerCoin network accounting for the original coin distribution. In addition, when the 2016 fork took place, a new blockchain with a new genesis block was created which facilitated the swap from NavajoCoin to NavCoin and kept things very much the same for coin holders.

The NavCoin community has been at the forefront of the project since its early days, and our community focus manifests throughout our project and influences how the network operates, is secured, and how it governs itself. At its core, NavCoin is a blockchain based network that empowers its users by allowing them to conduct peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions without any intermediaries, with users being able to make completely private transactions as desired.

Our Community Focus

NavCoin is a community run, open-sourced digital currency with privacy-enhanced features that ensure that individuals are free to transact as they wish. In addition to being easy to use, NavCoin incorporates its community as much as possible, and the project is supported by community members via various activities including staking, funding, and overall protocol governance.

NavCoin Staking

The NavCoin blockchain is completely open source, and secured by a global node network. Furthermore, our network makes use of a Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, which allows community members to use their NAV to help determine network weight when validating transaction blocks.

Proof of Stake allows anyone to contribute to validating transactions, with the main requirement being that an individual holds NAV coins. As opposed to Proof of Work (PoW) which is resource intensive, PoS doesn’t require huge servers or elaborate setups and even a 5v Raspberry Pi can successfully run it.

As a result, getting involved in validating blocks is a straightforward process, and simply requires the downloading and installation of the NavCoin Core wallet. After transferring NAV to this wallet, anyone can then unlock their wallet to begin staking and validating blocks.

Open Protocol Governance

NavCoin is not centrally controlled by any one entity, and every member of the NavCoin community is free to contribute in any way they desire. In fact, our project acts as a true Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) with all protocol administration and consensus changes subject to an open, and transparent voting system.

Once again, the PoS consensus mechanism enhances community involvement as all NAV holders holding their coins on the public side can participate in the DAO by simply staking their coins. Crucially, each stake is the equivalent of one vote, which gives every wallet holder a say in protocol governance, and there is no minimum staking amount required for anyone to take part.

Community Funding

Our DAO voting system also supports our community funding which allows us to operate a self-funded treasury and ensure that all contributors are fairly compensated by the network for their efforts. There is currently a block reward of 2.5 NAV in place, with 2 NAV being redirected to the staker who found the block, while the remaining 0.5 NAV are accumulated in a decentralized treasury.

This treasury acts as our Community Fund and provides the resources needed to fund any community initiatives which come about as the result of DAO voting procedures. Launched towards the end of 2018, our community fund was the first decentralized dual-consensus model for on-chain governance, and locks-in requested funds whenever a proposal is accepted.

If desired, these funds can be released to a designated address via a single payment or multiple payment requests, and this ensures full transparency and efficiency by allowing the community to check on the quality of work being conducted while releasing the funds as required. In turn, the author of the proposal can also lock-in a partial payment before fully committing to completing their work proposals.

Our Technical Innovations

In addition to having a strong community focus, technical innovation has been at the heart of NavCoin since the beginning. As previously mentioned, we have been pioneers in PoS consensus mechanism usage, and have been at the forefront of the cryptocurrency “private transactions movement”.

Towards the end of 2016 the NavTech release enabled the anonymous “send” feature which removed the link between coins being sent to those that are received and was described as groundbreaking “dual-blockchain architecture” at the time. Ongoing technical developments saw NavTech replaced by our novel, self-developed privacy protocol called Boneh-Lynn-Shacham Confidential Transactions (blsCT) which obfuscates transaction details in a way that makes them completely private.

In addition, our dual currency system allows anyone to store and transact coins publicly via NAV if they wish or privately via xNAV, while our cold staking functionality allows for enhanced security of funds as staking can take place via offline wallets. To further simplify sending and receiving funds, the NavCoin Core wallet incorporates the Open Alias protocol which allows a wallet to translate email addresses into cryptocurrency addresses and does away with the need to use long character string addresses.

These are just some of our technical developments and our focus has always been to ensure technical progression, “user first” features, and privacy enhancements that support financial freedom empower our community to make P2P transactions as they desire.

What More Can You Expect?

With a solid foundation of innovation supporting us, we continue to look forward and 2021 will be packed with developments that will push NavCoin forward. These include the xNAV launch and NavCoin Core 6.0 release which is scheduled to take place on the 1st January 2021.

These launches will pave the way for an improved version of the xNAV mixing protocol, enhanced xNAV mobile support, and anonymous staking via xNAV which will also introduce anonymous voting to our DAO and allow us to deprecate the transparent NAV in order to move to a fully private system. We will also work on developing an ERC-20 bridge that helps to create a wrapped NAV token that can be listed on popular Decentralized Exchanges (DEXs) and integrated into leading Decentralized Finance (DeFi) protocols.

As you can see, there is much more to come and don’t forget that the network vote for the activation of xNAV starts on the 1st February 2021 so make sure to keep an eye on our social media channels for all the latest updates and you can also monitor all our activities here.