The Third Phase of the Activation of xNAV, Our New Privacy Protocol, Starts on February 1st, With the Consensus Rule Upgrade Vote
The final release of Navcoin Core 6.0 two weeks ago opened the doors for the activation of our new private coin xNAV. As part of Navcoin’s ongoing commitment to continuously create the best privacy-preserving tools for our community, we’ve dedicated most of our human force to the creation of the novel self-developed cryptographic protocol blsCT. Our developers have produced more than 850,000 new lines of code to make this innovation possible.
Nevertheless, due to the decentralized nature of our network, our development team can’t introduce modifications to the protocol unilaterally. The protocol is governed by Navcoin’s community through staking, and thus you are the only one who can approve changes to the consensus rules of our network. Once a majority of 75% of the community stakers signals in favor of the proposed changes, then and only then, will the new privacy-related functionality activate.
In this article we will try to answer some of the most common questions about this vote and how the protocol upgrade mechanism of Navcoin is designed.
Who can make changes to the project?
The Navcoin ecosystem can be divided into many layers.
One of them is the base-layer protocol that defines the rules to make it possible to establish a consensus between nodes, so that transfers of value can happen in a decentralized, trustless and distributed way. This allows a wallet to synchronize to the network, download the ledger, validate it and broadcast transactions to it. The protocol also controls how the network is secured, how peers are rewarded for their staking and contributions to the network, the amount of coins created in each block, and the frequency in which these blocks are mined, how our decentralized treasury and governance works, and which kind of transactions are allowed to occur. It is very important that every node shares the same rules. If part of the network decided to adopt a different consensus protocol, they would “fork” away from the network and thus would not be considered part of the Navcoin blockchain anymore.
Because any modification to those rules affects every holder of NAV, the introduction of changes to this layer are not decided by our team of developers, but are instead put to a vote where every holder can take part and express their opinion.
If we go one level higher, we have a broad family of wallets (Navcoin Core, NavCash, NEXT, etc.) that interacts with the network using the base-layer protocol. Thanks to the open nature of our protocol, anyone can develop a compatible client that can interact with our network by following the consensus rules. This also means that any changes to those clients (e.g. supported functionality, interface, etc.) are subject to the will of the development team of each.
How does the voting work?
Every holder of NAV is called to participate in the voting. When a block is staked, it includes a bit of extra information that encodes the casted vote. By default, Navcoin Core wallets vote “yes” to the changes proposed by the Navcoin Core development team.
These blocks are then divided in groups of 20160 blocks, equal to one week of blocks, and is then considered a protocol upgrade voting cycle. This cycle is different from the one used for DAO votes.
Whenever a majority of 75% of the blocks signal an approval for a proposed change to the protocol, the voting of that change will enter a new phase known as “Locked in”. This phase will give nodes one additional week for them to upgrade to a version that supports the newly accepted changes. When the voting cycle finishes, the consensus rules are enforced and clients running an older version will no longer be able to stake or validate new blocks or transactions.
Once the voting starts, you will be able to track its progress on Navexplorer.
What exactly is being voted on?
Navcoin Core 6.0 introduces two consensus changes.
The first protocol upgrade relates to “xNAV”, our new private token, bringing back to Navcoin the long awaited privacy protocol. A technical description of blsCT, the underlying protocol that makes xNAV possible, can be found here.
The second proposed protocol upgrade is labelled as “Exclude Blocks” and will protect the Navcoin DAO voting quorums in the case of an exchange deciding to enable staking for NAV. You can read more about this proposal here.
How can I vote?
In order to vote, you need to run a staking node and upgrade to Navcoin Core 6.0. If you stake your coins through a pool or using a exchange, you won’t be able to participate in the voting. We strongly recommend you to move your coins to a node that you manage yourself to be able to cast your vote.
By default, the wallet will vote “yes” to both upgrades. Read more about how to upgrade in this article.
If you wish to change the vote for any of the proposed upgrades, you will be able to do so by introducing the following entries to your navcoin.conf file:
To vote ‘no’ to xNAV:
rejectversionbit=10
To vote ‘no’ to “Exclude Blocks“:
rejectversionbit=12
