An In-depth & Broad Overview of the NKN Project

elysium-renegade (30)in #cryptocurrency • 6 years ago (edited)

Disclaimer: The following is not financial advice and is simply my opinion, thoughts, and personal research. Please do your own research and make your own financial decisions.

The New Kind of Network (NKN) team describes their project as a "connectivity protocol & ecosystem powered by blockchain for an open, decentralized, and shared Internet."

Ok, so they are tackling internet issues and bringing it to the blockchain. Why?

Net Neutrality: ISPs can throttle, block, prioritize as they see fit in the USA and the idea of a free and open internet is constantly under threat. You should be well aware of the recent and terrible actions taken by the FCC to repeal Net Neutrality and what a terrible situation this is for the future of the internet; Furthermore, other countries seek to control the internet through censorship, as well
Net Utilization Inefficiency: connectivity/bandwidth not dispersed efficiently in terms of available supply and demand
Deficiency of today's SDN: currently software-defined networks require centralized control, which results in a performance bottleneck and a central point of failure and vulnerability (take down the controller, and you kill the network)

How will NKN attempt to address these issues?

Cellular Automata (CA) is a highly scalable consensus method, which they will be applying to a P2P network with a vision of millions of nodes
Proof of Relay (PoR) : NKN claims this security method will allow tamper-proof, verifiable, secure data transmissions
NKN economic model with tokenization: rewarding others for contributing to the network, such as providing idle connectivity and bandwidth to other users
Providing a decentralized and open SDN, allowing for global participation: will address the failings of centralized, traditional SDNs mentioned above

How big is the target market?

I don't like talking about potential size of a market too much, as success depends more on adoption than size of a market a project is looking to disrupt
However, NKN claims the global communication industry is estimated to be $1.4 trillion USD; I would note that it appears even larger to me, as that appears to be JUST in the USA, with worldwide telecommunications spending at 6.5 trillion
regardless, it is a massive market and is continuing to grow

Is NKN Connected to NEO?

neo ecosystem.PNG

The above image is courtesy of MarcinPress and it demonstrates how many NKN and NEO community members see the NKN project and how it fits inside the larger NEO ecosystem; Yanbo Li, is one of 3 co-founders of Onchain (Da Hong Fei, Jun Li), which have each founded their own Blockchain projects: NEO, ONT, & NKN
- If you are interested in NEO & ONT, NKN is another project to look at
I will be interested to see if a closer connection is established between NKN and the blockchain projects NKN & ONT, in the coming months and what value this might bring to each project

Proof of Relay

consensus method: Cellular Automata(CA) which is a very novel way to reach consensus, in cryptocurrency field, as it hasn't been used in blockchain before now (with the cryptography guru, Dr. Diffie partnered with and advising the project, I have confidence they know what they are doing)
- Diffie has said CA is an excellent fit for cryptography and has great potential
- CA allows for global consensus to be reached extremely quickly and can be done so in a truly decentralized way, from my understanding

What about the Core Team!

Yanbo Li, Co-founder & core developer of NKN: Co-founder of Onchain, former engineering positions at Qualcomm, Nokia, and even Motorola; recently upgraded his education at Stanford
Zheng 'Bruce' Li, Co-founder & Strategy/Innovation lead of NKN: former tech program manager at Google, management positions at Nokia; developed and founded an outdoor 4G LTE small cell with embedded wireless backhaul for mobile data use in dense urban deployment as well as a mesh Wifi at Nokia; Masters of Engineering
Yilun Zhang, Co-founder, Core Researcher & Dev for NKN: PhD in physics from U of California; I believe he completed his PhD before his 20th birthday; a genius prodigy, in my opinion. This explains the lack of experience on his linkedin profile
Justin Wang, Core Researcher and Technical Marketing Lead of NKN: extensive experience in patents; Former master designer & developer at Ericsson(130K+ employees), former project manager at Google, Nokia, & Amazon; Masters Degree, Engineering
Allan Dixon, Business Dev. & Compliance at NKN: 20 years telecom experience; 5 years of management experience at Nokia; experience in forming partnerships
Chris Wu, Business Dev. & Operations at NKN: 6+ progressive experience at Qualcomm (Senior Bus. Dev. Analyst->Project Manager->Senior Project Manager), then Technical Program Manager at Amazon Lab126 (3,800 employees; builds devices like tablets, ereaders, Amazon Echo, etc)
Key Advisor:
- 1 of 3 key Inventors of public key cryptography (Diffie-Hellman); 2015 Turing award recipient; should not need an introduction
- His invention is used everywhere. In fact, cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin probably wouldn't exist in their current form or at all, without public key cryptography
- He and his lab is actively involved in the project; regularly scheduled meetings between NKN devs & Diffie
  - Consider that this is much better than many other advisors who are simply contributing their name and prestige to the project and don't actually contribute to the project

That is what an All-Star team looks like.

Relevant, extensive experience in big, publicly traded tech companies in all the right positions on the team. And their advisor, Whitfield Diffie, provides more than relevant expertise, advisory input & collaboration. Furthermore, they are delivering.

Community & Team Communication/Activity

Chinese telegram: 9K plus; this is not common for Chinese telegrams; quite large actually
English telegram:18K plus
Twitter:Nearly 7K followers and active

The NKN team has contests/giveaways that reward and engage community
team is active in telegram and has managed to develop an active telegram; telegram discussion can devolve into price discussion, but often people are talking about news/updates, tech, and the project
team responds to community concerns and questions

Roadmap, Github, & Progress

A long roadmap, but they are ahead on progress, already. They released their Github code 3 weeks ahead of their deadline.
- They completed this, despite working heavily on attending conferences, and spreading NKN awareness, demonstrating an ability to balance key aspects of success of most crypto projects: awareness, communication, and development

their github is full of activity, which is great; I'm not a coder, so I can't say too much about this, from firsthand, but will share what I know about their tech
testnet is live; can view a preview here; they have 15 live nodes worldwide
- their github currently has a dapp SDK for developers to build on top of the NKN P2P networking stack

they continue to work on the code and make progress; note, I am not a coder, so my thoughts on code progress should be taken with a large grain of salt. Refer Andre Cronje's coverage on NKN or another coder that you trust
Andre Cronje is a very well respected Crypto code reviewer, who originally published a review of NKN github on March 23, 2018 which was re-uploaded to Steemit since his Medium account got suspended (because Medium doesn't like Crypto awhole lot)
- suffice to say that Andre was confused originally by what was going on here, but co-founder Justin Wang wrote a response which Andre included in an update to the reposted article
- Andre's response was: So the core code is not yet available as open source and DNA and NKN have a soft relationship via Yanbo Li as the maintainer for DNA, all cleared up ;)
- Since then, Andre has been waiting for NKN to open source the code, which they did on June 12th. Andre has just published his newest review; see below for my notes and for the link.

UPDATE

Andre just published his newest review of NKN Github
Key points: Andre finds the tech and approach exciting and very different; while their alpha testnet is released ahead of schedule, the code is a work in progress (has editing notes and things to do still); Andre states this is fine for the point they are at in their roadmap
Andre states "With optimizations and the alpha release of their SDK coming out in August, this project definitely has potential"
Good news indeed, overall

Media Coverage and Presentation

NKN just recently redesigned their website and it's really well done
coverage of a recent blockchain meetup they attended with other well-regarded blockchain projects
The NKN project has been reviewed by many big crypto influencers, including many of the more technical and respected influencers. I'm not going to cover those they are here as there's too much, but the overall sentiment has been positive
CNBC Cryptotrader is due to publish an interview segment with Bruce Li

Partnerships & Rumors

Cryptic Labs: This is Diffie's research team and lab; btw Diffie, your site needs https upgrade
- Cryptic Labs is a research accelerator, specializing in fundamental cryptography research, and has a renowned and growing team of US & European researchers; their website verifies the NKN partnership with a link to a news article that covers the partnership briefly
Open Networking Foundation(ONF): Describes themselves as a "non-profit operator led consortium driving transformation of network infrastructure and carrier business models."
- This is one of those membership organizations, which NKN applied to and got accepted. They are at the Innovator level.
- I know ONF seeks to improve SDNs, which we noted above that NKN is focused on revolutionizing and disrupting
- What's the relevance to joining this? I would say one key factor might be making connections to other partner organizations. Some big name partners of ONF which could be relevant to NKN are: AT&T, Comcast (yes, the ISP devil), Google, Intel, Samsung, Microsoft, Tencent, Verizon, SK Telecom, Vodafone....the list goes on. You get the idea. I'm not saying NKN will partner with these companies, obviously. But there is some possibility for inroad connections to be formed through this membership.
Telecom Infra Project(TIP): Another membership organization, which NKN applied to and got accepted as a member; their goal is to collaborate and spur innovation and investment in telecom
- TIP states membership benefits as: network with fellow industry experts, and help shape the future of the telecom industry
- these both seem relevant to NKN's goals; however, I'm not sure if NKN had to pay membership fee or not or how stringent TIP is about membership applications; I'm also not sure how useful TIP will be, but it may allow for future partnerships that could bring success to NKN
- I would also note that NKN sponsored ('silver') their upcoming October 16-17th conference, which also lists Deloitte & Facebook as even bigger sponsors ('gold' & 'platinum' tiers), which suggests it will be big and will also give NKN some good publicity

With that in mind, let's look at a couple rumors briefly :)

Rumor 1: NKN in discussion of partnership with top 2 cable providers in the US - perhaps, this comes out of TIP membership or ONF membership or just connections team has made.
- This appears to be part of NKN's business plan: targeting ISPs to 'kickstart' the network
Rumor 2: Exchange listings. Community loves to discuss what potential exchange listing is coming up and say this or that. Very speculative, so I won't discuss further.

Competitors

QLC - My understanding of QLC (very limited) is that it is more focused on specific use cases, focused on WiFi, whereas NKN can do this and also mobile
Skycoin - Apparently, they are also trying to be a decentralized internet along with all of their other huge goals, using their overpriced skybox? IMO, I think this project will die.Not going to go further into this, as I don't think it's necessary.
I believe there are other competitors, which may compete with parts of what NKN is trying to do, such as Maidsafe and Substratum; but I don't have detailed knowledge about the differences. My understanding is that maidsafe is a dapp and might still not have an MVP. Substratum is also a dapp, but has a big community, I believe. In comparision, NKN intends to have ability to run dapps on top of their blockchain, and again already have a dev SDK for this.

Biggest Concerns

Adoption: This is one of the biggest concerns for any blockchain project, but NKN's vision TRULY requires adoption as its security depends on a vastly decentralized and global P2P network. However, this is a team that could actually succeed on their vision.
Reliance on various Internet Service Providers: My concern is that maybe ISPs could target and throttle NKN network participants. While I am sure that the team is considering this, I'm unclear how they are planning to address this. It is looking more like they want ISPs to be partners and help them kickstart NKN network, so I'm interested to see how ISPs are incentivized to partner.
Token Supply: Currently, 200 million supply is circulating; 700 million is total supply; 1 Billion is max (won't reach this for 25 years as 30% is a 'mining' reward for the mainnet)
- Supply will continue to unlock at a rate of 50 million tokens every two months, until supply is 350 million. Note that the overall % of supply increase becomes less and less with each unlock. Furthermore, the NKN team and foundation tokens are 35% of max supply and are vested for 3 years
Exchanges: The team is well aware that the community would like the project to be listed on more exchanges and while the team is working on this, currently NKN token is only traded on Gate & Switcheo; I view this as a short-term and possibly mid-term issue
Roadmap: We've covered this, but it is a long roadmap, so organic growth and use of the token is a fair ways off. However, the team has been clear about this and it should not be a surprise to the community