NavCoin Community Roundtable 003

Published in

Navio Collective

8 min readJul 3, 2019

This month’s community roundtable included a wide range of topics including branding, conference attendance, website statics and development updates.

Naming NavCoin’s New Privacy Protocol

Since the network vote has concluded positively indicating it would accept the improved version of ValueShuffle proposed by aguycalled there has been some debate within the community around what to call the new protocol. There was a range of opinions at the roundtable. Some people are in favour of leaving the name simple while honouring the origins of the protocol by calling it something like “ValueShuffle+”. Since the protocol is essentially made from the combination of CoinJoin and Bulletproofs “CoinProof” was another suggestion. Other suggestions were more catchy like “Phantom Protocol” and “Spectre”, with a few tongue in cheek suggestions like “Basic Human Rights Protocol 001”.

Ultimately there was no consensus on a name, but it is something the community could figure out as the protocol is developed or even hold a network vote on using the new NavDAO Council features being developed.

More information on NavCoin’s upcoming privacy protocol can be found in this reddit post.

Effectiveness of “All Eyes on Us” Campaign

So far beekart’s CoinGeko email and banner campaigns have been quite successful. Proletesseract shared some google analytics that showed nearly 8% of the traffic to NavCoin.org over the last month coming from the sponsored campaigns. The campaign is still ongoing and some more accurate stats should be available as the campaign runs its course. It’s an encouraging sign that the community funded efforts to run a sponsored campaign is indeed attracting new users to discover NavCoin.

Some other interested stats were shared. Looking at the web browser’s default language the biggest contingent of visitors after English speakers is Russian, followed by Italian and then Chinese. In terms of actual translations of the website viewed the biggest segment after English was Chinese, Russian and then Spanish. Either way you look at it we are getting some hundreds of visitors a month from the non-english speaking communities and again it shows the community funded efforts to translate the NavCoin website have been worthwhile.

In general there’s a lot of data in the analytics suite but we’re not doing much with it at the moment. One request from prole was that if anyone in the community is good with (or wants to learn) Google Analytics and is keen to help generate some insights for how to optimise the websites or the community’s promotion strategy they should reach out and get involved.

Ledger Integration Update

Mxaddict has already successfully created the BOLOS App required to run NavCoin on the Ledger cold storage devices which can be compiled and tested from this repository. However releasing this app is blocked by two things; Integration needs to be done in either NavPay, NavCoinCore or Next so its possible to construct and broadcast transactions which are signed by the hardware device. Secondly the derivation path for address generation needs to be standardised to BIP44 so it complies with the standard that Ledger uses.

The derivation path change is currently being tested in this GitHub Issue.

If you’d like to lend a hand testing either of these changes, please head on over to GitHub and talk with mxaddict in the issue comments.

NavPool Launch Update

Prodpeak gave the community a detailed update of the adoption rates of the newly launched cold staking platform NavPool. After being launched only 3 weeks ago the NavPool boasts nearly 200 users who are cold staking approximately 1,000,000 NAV through the service. The majority of users are staking somewhere between 1,000 NAV and 10,000 NAV with only 3 stakers having balances over 75,000 NAV.

The initial sign up rush seems to have died down a bit but the platform is still regularly seeing a steady flow of users discovering the service.

There is some concern in the community that the service will promote centralisation and there was discussion around mitigation strategies like setting up multiple pools run on different web hosts, or run ODroid give aways to help users transition to running their own node. Currently the service is free of charge but there are plans to introduce a fee which prodpeak is hoping will incentivise larger holders to move away from the pool and setup their own nodes.

For more information about NavPool or to sign up visit the NavPool website.

Documenting NavCoin’s History

NavCoin has a very winding history, first starting as Summercoin which was actually abandoned by the original developers, then relaunched by the community as Navajocoin in 2014 and then eventually rebranded to NavCoin in 2016. It’s origin story has been somewhat lost to the sands of time and because of the way it started some of the founding documents which exchanges and services often ask for in listing applications simply don’t exist.

The community thinks it would be worth while to create some of these documents in retrospect and keep them updated for people to access and circulate.

A recent presentation that proletesseract gave about NavCoin at the New Zealand Blockchain Association is a good base for the high level introductory document which outlines what NavCoin is all about and what is part of the eco-system. It was suggested for prole to update the document and find somewhere on NavCoin.org to host the download.

Another suggestion was to write a current white paper for NavCoin which outlines how the protocol works for more technical users. Work on the NavCoin white paper was actually already started in this GitHub repository.

If you would like to get involved and help to write any section, there is a proposed document outline written in an issue. To claim a section just make a comment on the issue and start writing! Section’s 7 and 9 have already been drafted by marcus290.

Logo Design

Some discussion was had around whether or not the current NavCoin logo should stay or should be redesigned. The community were kind of split on the issue with some members thinking the branding needs an overhaul and others thinking the variations we have now are good enough.

With no clear consensus on whether any action is necessary the question remains unresolved. If any brand designers are interested to work with the community to create a new logo, by all means reach out and start the conversation on discord.

Merging the NavCoin Websites

Currently the main open source websites for NavCoin are kind of spread out with NavCoin.org dedicated to the protocol, NavHub for projects and services built on top of the protocol, NavCollab for community fund project collaboration and the NavCoin Knowledge Base. There has been some discussion about whether it is confusing to have so many websites or if they should be combined into one all encompassing site.

The original reason for structuring the sites like this was to clearly seperate what is part of the NavCoin protocol itself and what is built on top of the protocol for regulatory compliance reasons. If a third party provided service appear to be too intertwined with a decentralised blockchain protocol it can effectively endanger the token of being considered Securities in the United States jurisdiction.

The reason still stands, so the decision to keep the sites seperate is still valid. That said, there is definitely room for improvement of the sites and some of NavCoin’s web developers have ideas about how to make it easier to use and contribute to. With the approval of the NavCoin Websites Bounty program, it is hopes that some of these improvements can worked on.

Hero Members

The NavCoin Discord has a special user rank of “Hero” which doesn’t really grant any additional priviledges on the server but is more of a badge of honour for helpful citizens of NavCoinland. Earlier in June the rank was awarded to Goku, Verrideo and cryptoeye for recognition of their efforts of being active and contributing members of the NavCoin community.

There was some question around how to nominate people to become NavCoin Heroes and what the criteria are. Essentially there is no nomination process or anything like that and basically if moderators or other heroes see someone going above and beyond they can recommend them to be promoted to the hero rank to a moderator at any time.

NavCoin Representatives

There is some desire in the community to have NavCoin represented more at blockchain events and conferences. It was suggested that even just attending events with a NavCoin t-shirt on and talking with other attendees is more than enough to spread some awareness to the project.

It is a good way to get NavCoin directly in front of developers and other people who are likely to be interested in the project.

No sponsorship of representatives was discussed, but it could be possible for the network to sponsor some NavCoin t-shirts or even conference tickets with the Community Fund. So, if any NavCoin community members have conferences or meetups which would be good to attend in their area they should reach out to the community and start the conversation.

Naming the NavCoin DAO

Lastly, what to name the new DAO functionality that aguycalled is working on which extends the current Community Fund. Some ideas were thrown around and the community thinks its best to keep the idea of the fund seperate from the council since the two can have independent functions.

In the end it seems straight forward names like “NavDAO Council” and “NavDAO Fund” are preferred for the two branches of the NavDAO.

It’s likely this will be confirmed closer to the promotion and launch of the new voting functionality.

The Next Community Roundtable

NavCoin’s monthly Community Roundtable takes place on the first Monday of every month at 8pm GMT. The next one is scheduled for Monday 5 August.

https://navhub.org/events

The Roundtable event is open to anyone to read or contribute to the conversation. If you would like to be part of the future of NavCoin then all you have to do is get involved. And as always a special thanks to salmonskilroll for hosting the roundtables and taking the meeting minutes.

Don’t forget that you can receive this article by email. If you would like to be added to the mailing list, please sign up here.

Till next month!

— proletesseract