What Is NKN (NKN)?

NKN (NKN), or New Kind of Network, is a network that focuses on creating a decentralized and open-source network protocol for public blockchain-based peer-to-peer (P2P) networks to share network bandwidth and internet connectivity. Its main objective is to address the challenges faced by today's internet, such as centralization, scalability issues and security concerns.

Who Are the Founders of NKN?

NKN was founded by Yanbo Li, Bruce Li, and Yilun Zhang. They have a background in networking software and blockchain technology. The project lists Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha, and Whitfield Diffie, inventor of public-key cryptography as advisors.

What Makes NKN Unique?

NKN Mainnet was launched in July 2019 and has up to 25,000 full consensus nodes. According to NKN's whitepaper, the project has three main goals: decentralizing internet infrastructure, improving scalability, and promoting network security. Overall, the aim of NKN is to create a cost-effective platform for decentralized applications by harnessing the collective power of the community.

Notable use cases for NKN include: Content Delivery system (contract with Chinese video giant iQIYI); Edge computing (contract with China Mobile); D-chat (secure messaging app); nShell (secure remote terminal access).

NKN’s consensus algorithm is based on Cellular Automata, where a simple local majority rule can lead to system-level convergence in a small number of iterations. The design goal is to scale to arbitrary numbers of equal consensus nodes.

NKN uses a global addressing scheme based on public keys, in order to enable direct peer to peer communication without centralized servers. The routing of packets is based on the Chord Distributed Hash Table (DHT), which maps each NKN address to a random and verifiable position on the Chord DHT ring.

Related Pages:

Read about Decentralized Applications (dApps).

Learn more about Web 3.0 with CMC glossary.

CoinMarketCap takes a deep dive into DePin (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure).

How Many NKN (NKN) Coins Are There in Circulation?

NKN is the native token of the NKN network. It has a maximum supply of 1,000,000,000 tokens, with 754,831,362 NKN in circulation.

How Is the NKN Network Secured?

NKN utilizes a mechanism called Proof-of-Relay (PoR), also referred to as “useful Proof-of-Work”. Unlike traditional proof-of-work (PoW), such as the consensus mechanism deployed on Bitcoin, which rewards based on computing hash functions, PoR rewards miners for relaying real-world (useful) data along the network.

Where Can You Buy NKN (NKN)?

NKN can be purchased on various centralized exchanges such as Binance, Coinbase, KuCoin, Bittrex, Huobi, Gate.io, Bitget, Crypto.com and more.

Keep track of NKN live prices in real-time with the CMC mobile app.