Latest Developments & Outlook For 2022

Aloha Navigators,

We hope the beginning of the year is going nicely wherever you are!

Since there’s been quite some action happening for the Navcoin project and community during these past months, we believe this to be a good moment to reflect on and summarize the most important updates and news.

First: the driving force, the protocol updates

Back in November 2021, the latest Navcoin Core release, called Discovery, was approved by the network. It got activated on the mainnet later in December.

It included several major upgrades regarding fee management, the DAO and its proposals, xNAV protocol updates and the introduction of dotNAV (full article here). Most importantly, this protocol update will be the building block for our upcoming introduction of private NFTs.

Private NFTs should be an essential feature of the blockchain, most importantly to avoid any malicious actors gaining access to public information about the token’s owner. With the main pillar of our protocol being privacy, we believe in the importance of NFTs being supported by privacy protocols such as Navcoin.

If you would like to know more about this matter, have a look at this article written by our community member siflu.

With Discovery running on our blockchain, it is now a matter of activating the feature via a consensus change vote. This is going to get proposed soon, so stay tuned!

And second: the soul of the project, the community and the team

Navigators.social

In November we launched the Navigator’s Social Hub, a social mining platform through which you can earn NAV by spreading the word about the project via social media, see the article here.

The purpose of the platform is to promote engagement and awareness of the project, so we have introduced ongoing moderation for the submissions in order to reduce interactions done merely to collect points without meaningful contribution. See the update here.

Funding and core team building

Amazing news happened at the beginning of the year and Navcoin received private funding. This enables us to focus on recruiting a core team with longer-term positions and undergo flexible collaborations, providing us with a more focused and adaptable way to drive Navcoin forward. This comes on top of our core and ever-lasting Community Fund projects and activities.

We are very excited to share that mxaddict is now part of the Core Team, a long term community supporter who will now help push the development further. Welcome!

Last but not least, we now have the ability to start working on higher-level strategic (non-development) areas, such as introducing a Marketing Strategy to drive up engagement and reach of the Navcoin project.

More information about this news and how to apply here.

And now the future, the 2022 outlook for our tech and community

Core team

The main focus will be to build a core team, with dedicated professionals and responsibilities for all the relevant areas of the project. We foresee this to be an ongoing effort, always adapting to the needs that Navcoin might have.

On top of the current hiring profiles published and open (community manager and technical writer), we are also looking for testers and further developers to become part of the core team, an article expanding on it will come soon.

NFT activation

In order to bring the exciting world of NFTs into our protocol, we are actively working on the release of Whisper Wallet, a mobile wallet which will support staking, private tokens and NFTs — estimated release in Q1/Q2 2022.

A marketplace for private NFT would be the next step, and our main contributors are preparing to launch the proposal through our DAO.

Additional developments

• Adding support to the Wrapped Navcoin Bridge for wrapping BEP20 (Binance Smart Chain) tokens as private tokens and private trading for them (Estimated Q2)
• Chain Swap to a Private Proof of Stake algo (Estimated end 2022-Q1 2023)
• Conversations to create a SDK for in-game integration of Private Tokens and NFTs are being held on the community, which could be a great addition to the NAV ecosystem
• DAO funding — as usual, potential new proposals can always be submitted to the network for voting, development and implementation. If you have a great idea in mind that would improve the protocol, feel free to submit it!

Please note that these timeframes are susceptible to change, should any unexpected events arise. In case of any substantial delay, we will keep the community informed and update the roadmap accordingly.