Introduction

With Navcoin focused on being a currency to make payments, it's paramount that the development team allow for it to be used not just within their own ecosystem of applications, but also the ones that exist outside of it. Opening up to a great number of opportunities and future innovation, they've introduced wNAV as a wrapped representation of NAV and xNAV to be used in ecosystems such as Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain.

Private Tokens

Navcoin is rooted in privacy, and they want to extend those roots to as many as they can. Thus, they're introducing the ability for anyone to mint private tokens on our blockchain. A private token can represent arbitrary tokens created by anyone on their network, as well as tokens from other ecosystems with their value pegged and backed by another underlying asset (such as BTC or USDT).

Where To Buy Nav

You can buy NAV from decentralized exchanges such as AtomicDEX-CE (guide) and PancakeSwap (guide), or centralized exchanges like SouthXchange and Bittrex. If you wish to acquire xNAV instead, it's possible to swap NAV to xNAV at a 1 to 1 rate using one of their wallets.

Ecosystem

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

Staking And Governance

Their 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. Their 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, their 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, their 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 their network to fund initiatives through its decentralized treasury, their 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.

More about Staking

There is no minimum amount of NAV required to begin staking. The rate of rewards you will receive is dependent on two things; the size of your stake and the number of other’s coins staking on the network. This is because rewards are generated by the process of validating blocks (verifying user’s transactions on the blockchain).

How to Stake

The first step would be to get a VPS. They recommend you to make this step in Hetzner, a German provider which is famous for its low prices and high quality service. Simply create an account there and log in. Choose ‘Add Server’, select Ubuntu 20.04 and CX31 (2vCPU and 10GB RAM). The costs are as low as 10,59€ per month.

Once the server is created, you will see the details to access it over SSH. Connect to it and one command will be enough to set it up.

It will take about 30 minutes to complete.

You will be prompted with two important values when it’s finished: your staking address and the address of your Electrum node. Take note of them, because you will need them for the next step.

Now download NavCash. You can find versions for Windows, Linux or MacOS. When you launch it for the first time, you will be asked about which server you want to connect to. If you did set up your own and have an Electrum node address you can introduce it manually here, otherwise just check “Select server automatically” and click next.

The next window will ask you for a name for your new wallet. You will want to create two different wallets. The first will be a wallet which you will use for voting in the Navcoin DAO. We will call this wallet “voting”. Although creating a voting wallet is optional, they highly recommend you to do it.

You need to select the right wallet type. Which in this case is “Voting wallet for cold staking”.

You would have to create a new seed if it’s the first time you are going through this process. If you already created a voting wallet before and you would like to recover it, you’ll see the option to enter the seed words to reconstruct your wallet.

You will see the voting interface when the process completes:

Now, after correctly creating and backing up the seed words from the voting wallet, you need to create a second wallet which will be used for storing the NAV you want to stake. This is called the spending wallet. You will only access this wallet when you want to spend the coins.

In the menu File, select “New/Restore”. It will open a new window with the same wizard they’ve seen before. As a name, you can write “spending”. In the next step choose “Standard wallet”.

You will be asked if you want to enable staking.

If you don’t want to set up your own node, and want to use the pool from NavCash, you should choose the first option. The staking address will then be filled in automatically.

If you otherwise have an address from another pool that you’d wish to delegate your coins to, or you did set up your own node, you should choose “Yes, but I want to specify the staking address” and paste in the pool’s address.

After this, you will be asked for your voting address. You can get this from the tab “Voting address” in the voting wallet you created earlier. You should also deposit some coins in this address, in order to fund your future votes.

Complete the rest of the steps, and you will be set. In this case, for the spending wallet, you can also use a hardware wallet like the Ledger Nano S to secure your keys and this is something they strongly recommend you to do.

Lastly, you will need to send your NAV to the spending wallet to start staking. Click “Create Address” in the receive tab, and you will see the address where you can receive the coins.

Now you can sit and relax. Even when your wallet is closed, or your computer turned off, you will still earn rewards and your balance will grow.

Next Wallet

NEXT Wallet offers a great staking alternative. The process is the same for both mobile and desktop. Download the app and create a new wallet or load up an existing one by entering your seed phrase. Deposit NAV to your wallet by going to the “Receive” tab and sending coins to the shown address or by scanning the QR code.

Once you wallet it filled up, go to the “Staking” tab (top bar on desktop) or “Cold Staking” (side menu on mobile). Select “Start Staking” and confirm the pop-up message. A cold staking address will be created for your wallet and your balance will be automatically transferred to the Cold Staking address.

Privacy

Their privacy coin, xNAV, is built on top of their 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 them 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 their 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.