Our ecosystem

Navcoin as an ecosystem consists of three currencies with each of them being integral to who we are as a community, and what our network is capable of. Testing shows that the current capacity of our network is 260+ transactions per second with transactions showing up almost instantly following a confirmation within 30 seconds. Each of our currencies, and the features that they enable, have been carefully evaluated, voted on and activated by our network through its rigorous governance system.

Services

As part of our vibrant ecosystem, many supporting services to Navcoin are being built.

NavExplorer

An easy-to-use block explorer with access to real-time data on blocks, transactions, proposals, consultations and other on-chain activity.

NavPool

A non-custodial staking pool to help you stake your coins, earn an interest on them and participate in the governance of the network.

NavBridge

A gateway to swap your coins to wNAV and make use of them in other ecosystems such as Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain.

NavAlias

An integration with OpenAlias to make sending NAV and xNAV as easy as typing an email address.

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Our network is secured by a Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, which means that anyone can use their NAV to help validate transaction blocks. By comparison, Bitcoin's Proof of Work (PoW) consensus mechanism requires miners to calculate huge mathematical problems to process transactions and earn rewards. This requires expensive hardware and is extremely energy intensive. Our PoS consensus mechanism does away with these resource intensive requirements, and thus enables even a 5 Volt Raspberry Pi to take part in securing the network and get rewarded for it. With block times of 30 seconds, the block reward is 2.5 NAV. Of each reward, 2 NAV are for the staker, and 0.5 NAV are held in a decentralized treasury used to fund community initiatives.

In addition to helping to secure the network, our PoS consensus mechanism enables all public NAV holders to get involved with governing the network. There is no central authority controlling Navcoin, and community members play a crucial role in maintaining a fair and decentralized system of decision making. As a result, our network operates as a truly decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) with all protocol administration and consensus changes being subject to an open voting system. All community members holding their NAV on the public side can participate in the DAO by staking their coins, and each stake is the equivalent of one vote. This gives each wallet holder a say in protocol governance, and allows them to vote on any proposals that may be submitted to the network, and to ensure widespread participation, there is also no minimum staking amount required in order to take part.

Apart from enabling our network to fund initiatives through its decentralized treasury, our governance system also allows for non-binding consultations to gauge the sentiment of the network about a specific topic, as well as binding consultations to automatically upgrade one or more consensus parameters of the protocol itself.

Our privacy coin, xNAV, is built on top of our self-developed privacy protocol blsCT that merges Boneh-Lynn-Shacham (BLS) Signatures and Confidential Transactions (CT). BLS compresses a group of signatures into a single compact signature that authenticates the entire group, thereby shielding the origin of individual transactions. CT is a well-established privacy protocol that obfuscates the amount of coins in a transaction. On top of that, xNAV ensures personal privacy by using Stealth Addresses, public-key cryptography and the innovative Dandelion++ protocol. Stealth Addresses are private addresses that ensure complete privacy for the receiver of a transaction. Dandelion++ is a communication mixing protocol that breaks the link between a message and its source.

When using blsCT, two xNAV transactions can be merged into one, and transactions can be aggregated an infinite number of times. This allows us to scale effectively and support a high quantity of transactions across the network with users' transactions being completely shielded and untraceable. Anyone trying to monitor transactions being made through our network is unable to tell if a transaction has been aggregated or not, and users are able to merge their coins with other individuals making transactions. When doing so, a user's wallet uses Dandelion++ to send an anonymous request for coins from other nodes. These nodes can then connect and communicate between them using public-key cryptography to broadcast the session and their coins to mix. From those, the sender can randomly select several coins from the responses received. These coins are in turn mixed together with the original user's coins, and then sent to the network, and this system ensures true privacy while also enabling anyone who helps to facilitate the mixing-process, by providing liquidity, to receive a fee for their service, and thus generate a passive income. Combining these technologies, xNAV stands out in scalability and privacy, effectively supporting high quantities of transactions across the network with shielded and untraceable transactions.

With Navcoin focused on being a currency to make payments, it's paramount that we allow for it to be used not just within our own ecosystem of applications, but also the ones that exist outside of it. Opening up to a great number of opportunities and future innovation, we've introduced wNAV as a wrapped representation of NAV and xNAV to be used in ecosystems such as Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain. wNAV exists solely outside of our network and is backed one-to-one with NAV custodied in a multisignature wallet.

Our network has so far been connected to Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, Avalanche and Solana, and we plan to continuously evaluate and add support for other chains that can benefit our ecosystem as well as the cryptocurrency ecosystem as a whole. By having a wrapped representation of NAV and xNAV, we're enabling holders of our native coins to benefit from the features and applications of other ecosystems. One such application within the realm of decentralized finance, that we've immediately connected to, is decentralized exchanges allowing our community members and supporters of our network to trade NAV independently of centralized exchanges and thus doing so with no requirement for KYC checks. One can also provide liquidity to these decentralized exchanges, and earn a reward for doing so.

Aligned with our commitment to enable free access to the financial system, our goal is to achieve a higher aggregated liquidity in decentralized exchanges compared to that available in centralized ones. While a wrapped representation of NAV certainly has great benefits for our own ecosystem, it also benefits the wider cryptocurrency community, as users from other chains can now seamlessly acquire wNAV and then make use of the privacy-enhancing features that our protocol has to offer.