Navcoin’s Roadmap for Q4 2021: New Website, Privacy-Enhanced Transactions coming to our NEXT Mobile Wallet, Navcoin Core 7.0 Mainnet Upgrade and More

Dear Navigators!

We’re here to tell you about a number of exciting things that will take place within the Navcoin ecosystem over the coming months.

In the last few months, we’ve focused mostly on the release and fine-tuning of Wrapped Navcoin (wNAV) resulting in its successful launches on Binance Smart Chain (BSC), Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche and Polygon (MATIC).

Our focus on wNAV has been paramount and necessary to ensure Navcoin’s resilience in the current global situation in which the cryptocurrency space has seen an increase in regulatory pressure. Recent KYC enforcements made by some centralized exchanges has cemented this and shown how important it is for digital currencies to have the infrastructure ready to be present in as many DeFi ecosystems as possible.

Having created a solid DeFi foundation for Navcoin to continue to thrive in, we’re now ready to take on new things:

Navexplorer Updates

ProdPeak has pushed some great updates to NavExplorer, our self-developed block explorer, featuring a better view of proposals, payment requests and DAO votings. The address section has also been revamped allowing you to sort the list by the spendable or stakable balance, and to see certain addresses labelled, e.g. if they belong to a centralized exchange.

The New Website

To better reflect what Navcoin is about and what we’re offering, anquii set out to redesign Navcoin’s website, and it’s due to be released in the second half of October. Improving our website and getting it up to speed with all the latest Navcoin developments is essential to have done prior to us initiating new marketing campaigns that can help increase our presence in the crypto community and beyond.

We believe that the new website will better help people to learn about Navcoin and to educate themselves on the tools that Navcoin offers, and with that in mind, we hope that more and more people joins our network and community to support our mission of protecting the financial privacy of every individual.

xNAV on Mobile Devices

During the last weeks, sakdeniz has worked tirelessly to finish the integration of the navcoin-js library in the NEXT wallet. This integration makes it possible to perform private payments from a mobile device. We continue to test and make improvements, and we’ve recently finished migrating the backend of the navcoin-js library to Dixie, which has greatly improved its performance.

Delivering the next version of NEXT with the best possible user experience has been the key reason behind delaying its launch. But rest assured, we’re now ready to announce its release date as October 15th!

Read more about the update, in the official announcement by NEXT, here.

Navcoin-js Hackathon

When NEXT has been released with support for xNAV, we’ll announce the details of a Navcoin hackathon that will begin on October 22. Any developer can participate in the hackathon and will be eligible to win prizes by developing apps and wallets on top of the navcoin-js library.

Examples of what could be built might be a wallet, a browser extension or a private messaging application based on xNAV, among many others.

Social Mining

We’ve hired an external developer to create a Social Mining platform. Social Mining will allow us to reward users who carry out actions that add value to Navcoin, either by participating in the different social media channels or by creating promotional content for the project.

Users will be able to register and link their wallets, Binance API keys, Reddit, Telegram, Discord or Twitter accounts and earn points based on the completion of tasks such as:

• Tweeting about Navcoin
• Creating a Reddit post about Navcoin
• Solving issues at Navcoin’s Discord
• Holding NAV
• Writing an article about Navcoin
• Creating memes about Navcoin
• Trading NAV on Binance or Decentralised exchanges
• Etc…

Coins will be distributed to users based on their earned points, creating a great incentive programme for others to join us and help spread the Navcoin message.

Get ready for its launch on November, 15th.

Mainnet Protocol Upgrade: Navcoin Core 7.0 — Discovery

We aim to release the next version of Navcoin Core, named Discovery, on November 24. The Navcoin Core team will propose a set of new protocol changes, which will only get enforced and activated after a majority of the network signals its acceptance. Feedback and comments are open about the following proposed upgrades:

Burn Transaction Fees: We propose that transaction fees are effectively burnt and removed from the circulating supply, as opposed to the current protocol, where fees from a transaction included in a block are added to the staking reward.

Better management of the coin emission: We propose a change to allow the combined vote of two consensus parameters: Block Reward and Contribution per Block to the Community Fund. As both parameters affect inflation, we consider it a great utility combining their votes.

In addition to this change, we will propose the creation of a new type of Community Fund proposals. This new type of proposals, to be named Super Proposals, would coexist with normal Proposals, and emerge as a possible solution to not being able to limit consensus changes’ duration. They would differ from the normal proposals in that they would print the requested coins instead of subtracting those from the amount available in the Treasury. This can be seen as a similar approach to temporarily increasing the contribution to the Community Fund, but with the guarantee of a limited impact, as reverting a committed consensus change is never guaranteed to happen: seeing a Super Proposal worth 5,000 NAV approved, would be equal in terms of inflation to increasing the Contribution per Block to the Treasury from 0,5 NAV to 1 NAV for 10,000 Blocks, but with a guaranteed predictable impact.

As such proposals would impact inflation in the same way a consensus change does, its approval threshold would be increased in comparison to legacy proposals to match the requirements needed for approving consensus changes.

xNAV mixing protocol changes and transaction structure optimization: We propose to optimise the cryptographic verification protocol of the transaction candidates used in the xNAV mixing protocol, in order to halve their size by combining the 2 range proofs in 1 single proof. This will greatly reduce network load and improve the performance of the nodes.

Additionally, we propose to modify the transaction’s output serialisation format, in order to better compact the different transaction fields. By creating special signal bits, we will compress scalars serialised as empty vectors down to 1 byte, thus reducing the transaction size slightly as well as creating room for a more creative use of the outputs.

dotNAV, an on-chain naming service: We propose the launch of an on-chain naming service, denominated dotNAV. Users would be able to buy names with the suffix .nav directly on the NAV blockchain, and later associate those names to NAV/xNAV addresses, internet resources, etc. Prices will be set according to the name length (shorter names have a higher price while longer names would see their price lowered), with all the proceedings going directly to our Community Treasury.

dotNAV name owners will be able to sell their name to others inside the Navcoin blockchain. This will serve as a practical demonstration of the possibilities of the Navcoin blockchain to host trustless trades thanks to the combination of Atomic Swaps and the aggregability of BLS signatures.

NavCash Upgrade With Support for xNAV and Mobile Devices

In December, we will release an upgraded version of NavCash featuring support for private transactions, improved management of cold staking, dotNAV support, importing Navcoin Core and NavPay wallets, and a revamped user interface.

That’s it for now! Stay tuned for the updates and releases mentioned in this article, as well as our 2022 roadmap, which will be announced towards the end of this year!