NavCoin News — July 2019. Welcome to the first of the new monthly…
By: Craig Macgregor
Tags: Open Source, Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, Decentralization, Bitcoin

Welcome to the first of the new monthly community news format. There’s a lot to get through because as always the NavCoin community is an absolute hive of activity.

NavCoin Core RC 4.7.0 Testing

The Release Candidate for NavCoin Core 4.7.0 is currently undergoing community testing. This release is the culmination of 40 Pull Requests spanning the last 2 and a half months of code contributions from NavCoin Developers. There have been a long list of technical improvements made including moving the Community Fund data to the CoinsDB and pulling in multiple changes from upstream code bases. These changes touch quite a bit of the core code base and require thorough system tests before they can be launched onto the main net with confidence.

So far the NavCoin Community have uncovered and resolved multiple bugs through the release candidate testing program and testing will continue until the version is considered stable and bug free.

If you care about your NAV being kept secure and want the wallet to continue working correctly on your computer, then you should get involved in testing the release candidate. It’s everyone’s responsibility to participate and help the developers find bugs before they appear in the wild.

Even if you’re not a developer, you can try the new version on your system and report any issues you’re having. And if you are, there’s bounties to be claimed by contributing to NavCoin Core, so get involved!

Grab the NavCoin Core RC 4.7.0 and leave your comments on GitHub.

NavCoin NEXT Mobile Launched

Seyhan Akdeniz has added a mobile offering to the NEXT wallet range with the launch of the NEXT Wallet on Android. The NEXT Wallets now include a desktop full node which can support multiple cryptocurrencies, a NavCoin lite wallet and now the Android mobile wallet.

The mobile wallet leverages the bitcore libraries published by BitPay to provide the core blockchain functionality, meaning all your private keys are securely generated and stored on your device only. It’s all open source so you can review the code and even compile it yourself if you’re so inclined.

The wallet itself features some unique features like price charts and the ability to view community fund proposals and payment requests in the wallet as well as the usual things you would expect from a mobile cryptocurrency wallet.

It’s definitely a welcome addition to the NavCoin Wallet family and you can download NavCoin NEXT on Google Play today.

If you like the project and want to get involved you can star Next Mobile on GitHub and join the developers on the NavCoin Discord chat rooms.

Website Bounty Program Online

The NavCoin Websites Bounty Program has been off to a great start with over 23 issues being closed on in the program backlog since it launched only a few weeks ago. So far 1,900 NAV have been claimed and 14 NAV staked by the Bounty Program’s cold staking address.

One of the first items to be completed was a new page on NavCoin.org which promotes the current NavCoin Core and NavCoin Websites bounty programs.

https://navcoin.org/en/bounties

Here you can read the details of how the bounty programs work, what is covered by the programs and instructions on how to get involved.

There’s also been a raft of other changes to the NavCoin Websites including the addition of new exchanges, new merchants and changing how the news is run which will be further discussed throughout this article.

To get involved, check out the NavCoin Websites project on GitHub and see if there are any issues which you can help with, or create your own issue and ask for it to be appraised for a bounty.

NavHub News Running on Medium

Another change to the websites sponsored by the bounty program has been to power the NavHub news with Medium instead of the GitHub based content management system. This means that adding news to the site is now as easy as writing an article on Medium and submitting it to the NavCoin Collective.

The NavCoin Collective is an open publication to which anyone is able to submit an article. Whether you want to share the achievements of your NavCoin project, promote your community fund proposal, educate the public about NavCoin or anything else you think is important to share, you can be a part of the NavCoin Collective.

If you want to get something published in the NavCoin Collective talk with the community on the NavCoin Discord chat rooms to get added as a writer.

Another reason why this change is important from a technical point of view is that the news is now pulled dynamically into NavHub by an RSS feed and consumed by some stand alone React components that are peppered through the Hugo static site. This approach gives us the transparency of running the important parts of the site statically from GitHub while paving the way for some parts to be dynamic. This same approach is going to be used in some areas of NavCoin.org including wiring the Roadmap to the GitHub project which will help to keep the content on the site more current.

“All Eyes on Us” Results Published

The Community Fund sponsored marketing campaign “All Eyes on Us” has concluded and NavCoin Contributor beekart has published an article detailing the results to the NavCoin Collective.

After diving deep into the Google Analytics of the sites beekart discovered that the CoinGeko campaign was statistically a huge success. The banner campaign run on their site saw 300,000 impressions and achieved a clickthrough rate of 0.11%. This might not sound like a lot but it’s nearly three times the average clickthrough rate reported by industry analysts.

Lessons have been learned and insights gained which leave beekart well placed to try and top this effort in his next proposal. You can read his full report by clicking on the link below.

WikiLeaks Shop Accepting NAV

NavCoin has been added as a payment method to the official WikiLeaks merchandise store the WikiLeaks Shop. A short list of 20 select cryptocurrencies including NAV, BTC, LTC and ETH have been added as accepted currencies by the shop.

If you want to show your support for WikiLeaks, head on over to the shop and purchase some merch with your favourite crypto today.

The WikiLeaks Shop has been added to the growing list of merchants accepting NAV on the NavCoin Merchants page alongside 10 other new additions to the site.

This list is not by any means exhaustive and there are many more places you can spend your NAV online and in the real world. If you accept NAV and want to promote your business, make an issue on the NavCoin.org GitHub with some details about your store and it can be added to the list.

New Exchange Listings

Over the last month NAV has been added to multiple new exchanges including CoinZark, Zwaply, Crypto Wolf & Bitladon. Through the website bounty program the NavCoin Exchanges page has finally caught up with nine new listings being added to the page recently.

Of the new listings Bitladon is of particular interest as they are yet another fiat on/off ramp for NAV to EUR. If you’re in the EU and you want to purchase or sell NAV you should check them out.

Another exciting development in the exchange space is that Poloniex — one of the USA’s premier crypto exchanges and long time supporter of NavCoin — has enabled fiat bank deposits for their retail customers in 80+ countries. Currently there are only limited USDC pairs and you will still need to trade through USDC / BTC and then BTC / NAV but it is a major step in the right direction for access to and adoption of cryptocurrencies world wide.

Stack Of Stake Adds Custodial NAV Staking

Staking platform Stack of Stake has recently added NavCoin to its platform giving the ability for its users to stake NAV without needing to run their own node. As of now, the platform does require you to send your NAV into their custody to stake on your behalf. Just like sending your coins to an exchange, there is always trust and risk involved in sending your crypto to third party services and we recommend you do your own research before sending your crypto anywhere.

Their team have expressed interest in adding a NavCoin cold staking option to their platform so users can stake remotely while remaining in control of the spending keys.

If you don’t want to wait for cold staking on Stack of Stake, you could try the non-custodial platform NavPool which utilises cold staking and also allows you to vote for community fund proposals through the platform.

Community Fund Update

There is currently 57,228 NAV available in the community fund with 6 pending proposals and 2 pending payment requests actively being voted on.

There are 3 new proposals being voted on this week by the network.

Airdrop of Taiwan Crypto Forum (550 NAV)

Members of Taiwan’s biggest cryptocurrency forum will be airdropped small amounts of NAV for doing various tasks like installing the wallet or signing up for NavPool.

https://www.navexplorer.com/community-fund/proposal/9cddd76eb34b609163f873bd7425c55dcfa6c3ffd7e871762ec4f440065d94c2

NavCoin DAO Extension (50,050 NAV)

NavCoin Developer aguycalled has put forward a proposal to fund the development and implementation of the DAO extensions.

https://www.navexplorer.com/community-fund/proposal/9cddd76eb34b609163f873bd7425c55dcfa6c3ffd7e871762ec4f440065d94c2

Vulnerability Disclosure (25,200 NAV)

Bug bounty hunters art_of_bug have created a proposal to disclose and fix security holes which they claim may effect NavCoin Core.

https://www.navexplorer.com/community-fund/proposal/9cddd76eb34b609163f873bd7425c55dcfa6c3ffd7e871762ec4f440065d94c2

+ More Existing Proposals

To check out the full list of pending proposals and payment requests, visit the community fund page of the block explorer.

https://www.navexplorer.com/community-fund

And remember, anyone can submit a funding proposal which gets voted on by the network. To learn more about how the community fund works and kickstart your next crypto project, head on over to the NavCoin Community Fund page.

https://navcoin.org/en/community-fund

That’s all for this month. Don’t forget that you can receive the monthly news by email. If you would like to be added to the mailing list, please sign up here.

And if you want your project included in the community news, jump on the NavCoin Discord and post it to the #monthly-update channel.

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