Navcoin Technology For Beginners

Navcoin is a PriFi Ecosystem that has been built over five years ago, includes the self-developed blsCT protocol and unique features such as private tokens and private NFTs. Blockchain technology and cryptography enables us to create new solutions in order to maintain and/or increase our users’ privacy.

Privacy is not just ‘important’, it is a fundamental human right. We at Navcoin believe that people should be able to make private transactions in order to protect their financial activities from the eyes of a third; there are many good reasons for using privacy solutions besides the small part of illicit activities that is happening:

Personal Freedom

• Freedom rights are non-negotiable, however, money is needed to pursue those
• If a citizen is not able to pay for certain goods/services his freedom gets limited
• Private Finance solutions enable you to maintain your financial privacy and thus your freedom

Financial Data Protection

• It is simply nobody’s business what financial transactions you are doing
• Governments are increasing their surveillance ambitions through CBDCs
• Data that is gathered by them will be used to gain full control

Personal Security

• If you are a wealthy cryptocurrency investors, privacy coins can help you obfuscate your funds on-chain, depending on the amount
• Protect your balances from malicious players/hackers

Business Privacy

• Bitcoin as payment option has disadvantages for businesses
• Clients as well as competitors can see their financial data

So, now you know already a bit more about what Navcoin offers and why it is important. But how exactly does the underlying technology work?

Navcoin Technology Explained

Privacy coins, same as other cryptocurrencies, are operating on the blockchain. On public blockchains, every transaction will be recorded; including who sends how many coins to whom. This leads to the possibility of tracing transactions, which is already done by private companies such as Chainalaysis who work also together with (U.S.) law enforcement and tax offices.

Privacy coins have special specifications and features that make it possible to avoid showing and recording this transaction data. Example, Monero: Stealth addresses, Ring Signatures and RingCT are taking care to dissociate accounts participating in a transaction, mixing identities with decoy identities and obscure the transaction amounts.

Navcoin developed its very own privacy solution in form of the blsCT-protocol, running on a PoS-consensus. Soon, Navcoin will operate on a fully private blockchain.

PoS-Consensus

The Navcoin network is secured by a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism that allows anyone to use their NAV to validate transactions. PoS is the alternative to Proof-of-Work (PoW) that requires miners to solve mathematical riddles to process transactions and earn block rewards. To do this, one needs expensive hardware and the will to pay a lot for energy.

blsCT Protocol

The blsCT protocol got developed by the NavCoin developers and combines the benefits of BLS (Boneh-Lynn-Shacham) Signatures as well as CTs (Confidential Transactions), enabling our users to transact Navcoin in full privacy — confidential, untraceable, unlinkable, while transactions are fast and the ecosystem scalable.

BLS signatures were already introduced back in 2001 and can compress a group of signatures into one, which then can be used to authenticate the entire group: All Navcoin transactions in one block can be combined to one tx with one signature.

While this gives us advantages regarding privacy and scalability, observers can also not possibly tell if a transaction has been aggregated or not. Here a diagram of how the aggregation market works, in which you can earn coins for participating in the mixing process:

Navcoin DAO

First things first — what is a DAO, anyway? It is short for ‘Decentralized Autonomous Organization’, an organization in which rules are embedded and enforced by code. There is no central entity having control over a DAO. In the following we will describe the single modules of the Navcoin DAO.

Consultations

The consultations process includes three phases, namely support, reflection and voting.

Support: In the support phase the consultation is created, set up with the ‘Maximum of voting cycles for a consultation to gain support’. If there is no support during the cycles the consultation will expire. In order to give others more time to review and support consultations the support then still has to pass the ‘earliest cycle when a consultation can get in confirmation phase’.

Reflection: The length of this phase is defined in the consensus parameter “Length in cycles for the reflection phase of consultations”. This is to give people enough time to think over what they want to vote on regarding the consultation.

Voting: The length of this phase is defined in the consensus parameter “Length in cycles for consultation votings”. Votes will be reset at each cycle. After the last cycle ends, the votes will be locked in and stored in the blockchain for future reference

Consensus Parameters

Since Navcoin operates on a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm, the consensus parameters are enforced on the whole network, while proposals for possible changes can be made by anyone.

Once a change passes the voting process it takes effect on the first block of the next block cycle. The difference to ‘consultations’ is that multiple answers are not a requirement and voting can end earlier in case YES or NO got at least 75% of the votes.

Community Funding

We are always working closely together with our community, thus also funding community efforts that help to optimize and grow the Navcoin ecosystem. 20% of each block reward goes to the Community Fund.

Community members can submit a proposal, vote on proposals, submit payment requests once an accepted proposal was worked off and vote on payment requests of others. More details about the voting and payment process here.

Navcoin Staking

Navcoin Staking is interesting for anyone who wants to support a decentralized private finance project while making profit. The Navcoin staking ROI is fixed at 4% (according to staking.com) and works with minimum system specifications (minimum 3GB HDD space plus 1GB RAM). Moreover there is no minimum amount of NAV required in order to stake.

Mission: Create a Fully Private Blockchain

In the near future, Navcoin will be a fully private and operational blockchain, which is our #1 goal for the time being. One of the changes that will be put in place is that xNAV will disappear and that the privacy properties of the blsCT protocol will be mandatory for any transaction in the Navcoin system.

Navcoin Products

Private Tokens & Marketplace

Private tokens will enable you to mint your own private tokens that then work on top of the blsCT protocol. All transactions made with these tokens are as secure and anonymous as regular xNAV transactions.

Those can be arbitrary tokens, but also tokens whose value is linked to an underlying asset/currency such as USD, EUR, or precious metals. Also possible are private tokenized in-game assets, real estate… There are really no limits.

Other blockchains, which are non-private, could gain a big advantage through facilitating the Navcoin ecosystem to give their non-anonymous tokens a fresh privacy-shield.

You will be able to trade private tokens on a DEX, a non-custodial exchange service designed to exchange Private Tokens on the Navcoin blockchain.

Private NFTs & Marketplace

NFTs have been the biggest hype in the crypto sector over the past two years and the trend is unlikely to go away, at least for the foreseeable future. For us, it’s not about the hype — it’s simply about promoting the maintenance of financial privacy in the NFT sector as well.

The problem is that most NFTs are minted on public blockchains like Ethereum that offer no protections for anonymized mining or payments. Anyone can examine transactions, find wallets, view assets, and draw conclusions.

On the Navcoin blockchain, you will be able to mint private NFTs. By using the blsCT privacy protocol, the transaction details (sender, receiver) will be obfuscated. The metadata of the NFT will still be public, but it will be impossible to tell who owns the NFT or from which person it was originally sent.

In order to make our role in the space clear, one of our community-funded projects will be the first decentralized marketplace for private NFTs.

Conclusion

Privacy coins are not the devil’s work, as governments and regulators would like to make you believe. They are what cryptocurrencies were usually all about back in the day: a private, anonymous means of payment.

Over the next few years, we are expecting a higher influx of new PriFi users and are looking forward to welcoming lots of them to the Navcoin ecosystem!

Let’s build! The future is decentralized — and private!