NKNx and the road to Narwhal

Since the very beginning of the NKN blockchain project, NKNx has been a great tool for helping miners and node-owners to monitor, troubleshoot and analyze their nodes. We have come a long way from a “smart block explorer” to a node/wallet manager and now we think it’s time to get you informed about the next big bang!

So are you ready? Then let’s go!

Bigger Team

As all of you know the 70,000 lines of code, 368 users, 855 wallets and 5,385 nodes from NKNx were solely maintained by Christian Busch (ChrisT) and Andrew Tawking (lightmyfire) — now a new challenger enters the ring!

With Sam Price (Kiaaauugh) we’re happy to have a new professional level designer on our side. Sam will take care of the graphical appearance of NKNx in the future as well as the user interface.

New Design

With our new team we’re finally able to create a consistent design language over all of our components in NKNx. So we are going back to the drawing boards, talk to some key users of our portal and will create a new stunning interface for all NKNx-ians.

Wanna have a look behind the scenes? Sure — here you are:

New node measurements incoming

With the release of NKN’s proximity routing many users complained that their mining profit decreased (also others noticed an increase but those weren’t complaining).

We got into some deep research with the team and found out some very neat measurements that will help miners to understand and optimize their nodes. The first public announced metric will be the Network Node Latency (NNL). The NNL is calculated as an average number from the round trip times of your node from all the nodes that have it as a neighbor. If this number exceeds a specific threshold NKNx will inform you that this node won’t be as profitable as others.

There are more measurements to come — so be prepared!

A companion for miners

Another thing we discovered is that setting up and configuring a node could still be improved — so we’re happy to introduce you to NKNx companion.

With this neat little tool you’re able to set up your node right from NKNx! Just create a new companion snippet, post it into your command line and let NKNx do the rest. But the NKNx companion can do more than just handling the setup of a node: But NKNx companion can do more than just setting up a node:

• Update your node from NKNx (auto-update is also possible)
• Start/stop your node
• Change and access wallet.dat and password without logging into your node
• Change the configuration-file
• more to come!

As a little bonus node-owners of DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode and AWS won’t have to even log into a VPS — just add your API-credentials to NKNx and we’ll do everything else.

Introducing NKNx Pro

As you read in this article NKNx is about to grow up very soon. As all projects we also have to find a way to cover our server costs (and maybe also to get some kind of reward for our work).

In the projects current state NKNx gets backed by the NKN-team and also from the referral bonus of the node tutorials from Christian. In the middle of this year that bonus will be exhausted and we have to look for another source of income.

That leads us to the introduction of NKNx Pro. NKNx Pro will offer you additional features that free users don’t have. For example:

• Monitor unlimited nodes on NKNx (free users will only be able to monitor 10 nodes)
• More node measurements
• Unlimited NKNx companions
• Access to new beta-features
• etc

We think a NKNx Pro account is a good way to support this project. We will also lay out our expenses so that every user can investigate where his money goes to.

Incentives

We always wanted to drive the community forward — so for this the NKNx team will run regular incentives (a.k.a. free stuff)!

Maybe you’ve got the most active node on the network? Or you’re running so many nodes that your VPS hasn’t got any more spare servers? We will reward the most active users with a free month of NKNx Pro or other prizes!

You see: There is much to come — and yet much more ideas in our heads — so stay tuned for more updates and features on this publication!

Yours sincerly,
NKNx Team

One last thing…

NKNx is a big project… but maybe it would be good if it gets much smaller… like pocket-size?!