The Navcoin Network Approves Protocol Upgrades, Including the New Privacy Protocol, xNAV
With the latest voting cycle on our network finishing yesterday, the Navcoin protocol is set to be upgraded with our new privacy protocol xNAV, and another proposed upgrade dubbed “Exclude Blocks”. Each of these upgrades was proposed, voted on, and approved by a 80% majority of Navcoin’s network, in which each Navcoin holder has had the chance to participate by casting their vote. You can find out more about each of the protocol upgrades here.
This cycle finished on block 4,939,200. Following our network’s upgrade procedures, new rules are activated 20,160 blocks after they are locked in, namely on block 4,959,360. We expect this block to be mined in the immediate hours after February 20th 00:00am (UTC)
We will ask exchanges to pause deposits and withdrawals of NAV from February 19th 08:00pm (UTC). We will monitor the activation of the new consensus rules and notify exchanges to resume operations once the network has shown to be stable.
The activation of the xNAV privacy protocol will create a new token in the Navcoin network. Swaps between NAV and xNAV can be done freely inside of the Navcoin Core wallet back and forth. Exchanges will not support NAV/xNAV swaps nor new xNAV trading pairs are expected to be added, as the swap ratio is 1:1 and both tokens will hold the same value. Users will be able to deposit xNAV tokens in exchanges to the already supported normal NAV deposit addresses.
An upgrade to the new Navcoin Core 6.0 is now mandatory for every node, and must happen before the activation at block 4,959,360. Nodes that do not upgrade before that block, will stop staking and will risk forking off the majority chain.
In the coming week, we will release Navcoin Core 6.0.1 featuring many performance improvements based on feedback from our community.
How to upgrade
Simply download the pre-built binaries for your operating system from our Github releases page and proceed as normal. No extra actions are required.
You can verify the integrity of the binaries by verifying the Gitian signatures available here against the public key 2782262BF6E7FADB (keys.gnupg.net) or by checking the SHA256SUM of the distributed packages against the one we’ve published in our Github releases page.
If you wish to build from sources, you can find full details on our documentation site.
Do I need to set up anything different if I’m an exchange operator?
Please add the following options in your navcoin.conf file:
excludevote=1
blsctmix=0
Where can I read about the technical changes on the protocol layer?
Visit doc.nav.community to read through our technical documentation.
The soon to be activated protocols introduce changes to transaction serialisation. Our forks of electrumx and bitcore-lib already support the new rules.
If you use a different library, we recommend upgrading to those. If you simply operate with the navcoind daemon through the RPC interface, you can continue using the normal procedures.
