April 2017 (III)

Here’s some of the latest news about Nxt over this last fortnight:

NXT COMMUNITY

• Poloniex Tutorial – How to Transfer Assets to the Official Nxt Client
• Future Blockchains – What is Nxt
• Webit Festival Europe – Jelurida Confirms its Attendance
• Larson Digital – Blockchain Hackaton that Relies on Nxt Tech
• Janus – Distribution Completed
• Farl4bit – New Asset LinkBuild
• Adel – ICO’s Terms and Conditions
• Nxt Node – How to Properly Shut It Down

DEVELOPMENT

• Jelurida – Ardor Blockchain Platform Design
• Google Chrome – Ardor Price

NXT IN THE MEDIA

• Gate of Bitcoin – NXT Coin, the Second Generation Cryptocurrency
• Steem It – The DAO Incident, Ardor (or NXT) and the Whole Confusion

PRICE EVOLUTION

• Aaron AG – NXT’s Technical Analysis
• Lumbridgecity – Time to Invest in NXT and/or ARDR?
• Weekly NXT/ARDR Price Evolution

Here below are more details about each of these topics:

NXT COMMUNITY

• Poloniex Tutorial – How to Transfer Assets to the Official Nxt Client
  

A few days ago, Poloniex made an unexpected announcement via Twitter stating that on the 2nd of May, they will be delisting 17 coins. Among these is Unity/Supernet, a well-known project among nxters, because, in the beginning, it was closely connected with the Nxt platform and community.

On May 2, 2017, the following will be delisted: BBR, BITS, C2, CURE, HZ, IOC, MYR, NOBL, NSR, QBK, QORA, QTL, RBY, SDC, UNITY, VOX, XMG

— Poloniex Exchange (@Poloniex) April 19, 2017

Up to now, the Supernet/Unity asset could be traded both on Poloniex and on Nxt’s Asset Exchange.  Upon Poloniex’s decision, those investors who don’t want to lose their investment must transfer their asset to their Nxt account, where, by means of this core feature of Nxt, it’s impossible for any entity to stop the trading of any asset.

In the following video tutorial, Arthur Penzl shows us how to create an account on Nxt and how to transfer your assets from Poloniex to your account using the official Nxt client (Next Reference Software – NRS)

The audio quotes are taken from the book ‘SNAPSHOT – Nxt, Unsurpassable Blockchain Solutions‘, a full guide to the history, the features, the community, and the evolution of the Nxt cryptocurrency platform. The book can be bought in our online store or from other shops such as Amazon, iBooks, etc.

More information: https://nxter.org/ae

Tutorial: Nxt Asset Exchange

SNAPSHOT – Digital and PoD edition of the Book Now For Sale

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• Future Blockchains – What is Nxt

This video recently published by Carl, of Future Blockchain, provides a brief introduction to Nxt. In it, Carl enumerates some of the features of Nxt, such as the Voting System, Multisignature or Account Control, Encrypted Messages, decentralized data cloud, decentralized Asset Exchange, decentralized Market Place, crowdfunding capabilites, etc.

The author also explains the big amount of different operations and menus that you can find in your Nxt Wallet, thus making possible for users to easily make use of all the available capabilities of this platform. As Carl outlines, this cryptocurrency has many functionalities integrated, thus allowing a lot of use cases.

The video also remarks that all the cryptocurrencies have the ability to work as a currency, but Nxt is one of the few cryptoplatforms that has more features integrated, thus opening up a new range of possibilities.

Source and more information: What is Nxt

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxN9JhKLzKePpT1abZPW27g

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• Webit Festival Europe – Jelurida Confirms its Attendance
  

Jean-Luc, lead core developer of Nxt and Ardor, has confirmed the attendance of Jelurida members Kristina Kalcheva and Tomislav Gountchev to the 8th edition of Webit Festival Europe, the European edition of the Global Webit Series, which will take place on the 25th and 26th of April at Sofia Tech Park. This event will be attended by large Bulgarian and European institutions and the huge attendee list includes global thought leaders, 5000+ attendees from Fortune 500 companies, major brands, policy makers, scientists, and the hottest startups.

There will be several in interesting activities that will take place during the event, related to things such as digital economy leadership, Fintech and blockchain, security and privacy, smart cities, big data and cloud, and many more.

Jean-Luc says:

Jelurida will be presented by Kristina and Tomi at the Webit Festival in Sofia next week, Apr 25-26.

If any Nxt and Ardor fans are visiting this event, should be able to meet them in the startup exhibition.

All the tickets for the event are already sold out, but if you want you can sign up for the waiting list and, in case of availability, you’ll be able to buy your ticket.

Source and more information: https://nxtforum.org/general-discussion/jelurida-attending-webit-festival-in-sofia-25-26th-april-2017

http://www.webitcongress.com/

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• Larson Digital – Blockchain Hackaton that Relies on Nxt Tech
  

In Huckletree Shoreditch, London, a blockchain hackaton organized by Larson Digital with $35,000 in prizes was held. Tasks were focused around developing blockchain-based architecture, security, transaction management, and other solutions underpinning the company’s platform. The participants were required to have skills in:  Java, blockchain, mobile apps, crypto wallets, encryption, digital content, bio identity, regtech…

The tasks will cover:
– Integrating Blockchain and DLTs technologies with eCommerce markets
– Handling Proofs of Identity and cryptographic Passwords
– Reporting across multiple native assets as Tokens
– Securing digital content specifically encryption/keys
– Blockchain regulatory reporting

For this event, the Nxt platform was highlighted:

The hackathon challenges related to blockchain will rely on NXT open-source code (GPL 2). More information for developers can be found on https://nxt.org/get-started/developers/

Please note, this is not sponsored or affiliated with Jelurida. All are welcome to join. All entries that are accepted for deployment will be open-sourced for benefit of community.

As this hackaton is about cloning Nxt’s blockchain and not using the current public blockchain, Jean-Luc, Nxt and Ardor core developer stated:

There is a good reason why Jelurida is not willing to endorse or support this event, and it is because it is not about the public Nxt blockchain but a clone, which the Nxt core developers do not support.

Source: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/blockchain-hackathon-tickets-33545833491

https://nxtchat.slack.com/archives/C0JR4J5NF/p1492540976636399

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In our previous newsletter, we talked about the latest news about the asset distribution plan that the Janus team has announced for this quarter, which included the transfer of 800 000 JNS tokens that were for sale on the Nxt Asset Exchange to C-CEX, where they were made available at a price of 3 000 satoshis each. The team is also planning to reduce the total supply to 37 000 000 JNS, in an asset-burning process that would take place in the beginning of July.

The plan has been really successful, and, thanks to the community support and feedback, the team has refined its original strategy once again. By opening itself to the BTC market which has a larger trading volume and number of users, together with the announcement of the incorporation of a new and recognized member to the team, as well as the announcement of the introduction to the ETC community and the launch of some new web projects, it was then possible to sell the originally-available 800 000 assets in addition to the 400 000 assets transferred from the Asset Exchange. With this, the JNS distribution is finally over. Current asset holders will benefit from bigger dividends due to the asset supply shrinkage, thus promoting long term investment.

Bjorn, from the Janus team, states:

We have completed the final distribution for our team, this was a small but needed part of our project to help us offset  internal marketing costs. With this sale ending it is time for our team to begin the process of supply reduction.

Transaction: 11120319234261742538

We started the token count at 99,999,999 JNS current total supply since burn was initiated is now: 25,201,489 JNS

This leaves 16,201,489 in circulation, assuming none of the JanusXT holders leave the Project

Moreover, a road map with the objectives for the following 4-5 months has been set up:

• Launch of Ethereum Classic community business
• Q&A session with our new team member and community. His focus will be on marketing our mainstream sites
• Media based site for JanusXT holders and our team
• Social Trading/Fintech beta launch prior to the full launch.

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• Farl4bit – New Asset LinkBuild

Farl4bit, a very well-known and active member of the Nxt community, has announced the launch of his new asset called Linkbuild. The linkbuilding management tool helps companies and website-owners manage their linkbuilding campaigns (linkbuilding is part of search engine optimization).

Farl4bit explains:

 

Linkbuilding for everyone
Linkbuilding.io has come up with a great and easy way to manage your linkbuilding all at one place. Integrate your portfolio and start managing your linkbuilding campaigns and partnerships. The robot ‘io’ will monitor the status of the links for you. Linkbuilding is part of SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which means optimizing your website to rank high in search engines like Google. Linkbuilding.io is an administration tool and does not cheat Google…
LINKBUILDING asset information
To raise funds for the development and promotion of Linkbuilding.io we are using the Nxt Asset Exchange. Linkbuilding.io is now in beta-fase and we want our asset holders to be part of the tool too. We are curious how you experience the tool and how we can improve it. The tool will be ready in a few months.
Asset name: LINKBUILD
Asset account: NXT-FTJF-Q6DM-47XC-54EC2
Asset ID: 11240133193452178590
Decimals: 4
Price: 10 NXT
Total assets: 570 000
Assets for sale: 85 500 assets (15%)

Rewards and dividend
When you support us with this crowdfunding campaign you will be rewarded with part of the profit. When you own for example 1% of the assets, you will get 1% of the profit, paid monthly in NXT with the dividend function in the Nxt Asset Exchange. Plus there are extra rewards:

• If you buy >1000 assets during ICO, you’ll get a linkbuilding account worth about $165 per year.
• If you introduce a new paying user you’ll get 200 assets (50000 assets reserved for this)
• If you join the forum signature campaign you will get 70 assets (7000 assets reserved)

Source and more information: https://nxtforum.org/assets-board/(ann)-linkbuild-asset-gt-crowdfunding-campaign-linkbuilding-io-gt-dividendreward/msg231471/#msg231471

https://linkbuilding.io/crowdfunding

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• Adel – ICO’s Terms and Conditions

The Adel team has presented a document with Terms and Conditions that constitutes a contract between Adel Ecosystem Limited and any of its future subsidiaries or affiliates constituting the Adel ecosystem. This terms govern the use of the website, the only official and authorized website for Adel, the sale of Adelphoi (“ADL”) through its Initial Coin Offering (“ICO”), and the holding and use of Adelphoi.

Adel’s ICO is the first one to meet Anti-Money Laundering (AML), Counter-Terrorism Financing (CTF), and Know-Your-Customer (KYC) requirements. It aims to raise at least 900 BTC. If this figure isn’t met, then the Voting tool would be used to decide about the future of the project.

By acquiring Adelphoi coins, whether from another stakeholder or through the ICO, you represent and warrant that you:

• Have a basic level of understanding of the usage and intricacies of cryptographic tokens, such as NXT, and other blockchain-based software systems
• Are at least 18 years old or the age of contractual capacity
• Are legally permitted to use NXT tokens in your jurisdiction
• Waive your right to participate in a class action lawsuit or a class-wide arbitration against any member of Adel Services
• Are not exchanging Adelphoi for any illegal purpose within your jurisdiction
• Understand that there is no warranty whatsoever on Adelphoi, express or implied, to the extent permitted by law, and that Adelphoi are created on an “as is” basis
• Further agree to accept sole risk for your participation in the Adel ecosystem
• Are not a USA citizen.

This document, together with the FAQ and the wide variety of white papers, projects, and marketing materials published by the Adel team are giving the go-ahead signal to the ICO with more info available to the public to make their decision, which is expected to launch on the 1st of May, 2017.

Adel is a global cryptocurrency community that is self-sustained, and offers its own economic ecosystem with the Adelphoi token. Our community focuses on creating, developing, and implementing use cases involving blockchain technology that covers a wide range of digital and physical industries. Projects are chosen by the community and successful ventures are either re-invested in for further growth or issued as rewards to Adel’s stakeholders

More information: Previous newsletter

Twitter: https://twitter.com/adelphoi_io Slack: https://adelchatinvite.herokuapp.com/

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• Nxt Node – How to Properly Shut It Down

The developers of Nxt recently shared a reminder that there is an easy way to properly shut down our Nxt node either from the User Interface or from the terminal. This way, we’ll avoid some minor issues that may come up, such as the blockchain file becoming corrupted thus having to download it from scratch. This wouldn’t mean, in any way, that the security of our Nxt account may get compromised for this reason, since all our accounts, balances, transactions, and so forth, are stored on the blockchain. Nevertheless, it could be a small setback that could easily be avoided.

Lior Yaffe, Nxt core developer, states:

The NXT node uses a Java mechanism called “Shutdown Hook” to close the database and perform necessary cleanup before shutting down the Java process. Killing the Java process without letting the shutdown hook execute may result in database corruption.

Therefore, when shutting down the NXT node, always use one of the following methods:
1. On GUI environment, use the “Shutdown” menu item from the system tray icon.
2. From the command line use the command

kill <pid>

If possible, never use the following methods for shutting down the node:

kill -9 <pid>

or kill the process from the Windows task manager or using Mac OS/X similar function

Jean-Luc, Nxt core developer, added to the above:

If you started the server from the command line in a terminal, pressing Ctrl-C there should also send the proper kill signal for a clean shutdown.

Source and more informtaion: https://nxtforum.org/nxt-helpdesk/how-to-properly-shutdown-your-nxt-node/msg231393/#msg231393

How To: Set up a Nxt node on a Raspberry Pi 2

The Forging Bounty Lottery campaign

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DEVELOPMENT

• Jelurida – Ardor Blockchain Platform Design
  

Jelurida, the corporation that joins together all the Nxt and Ardor core developers, has published a new document divided into 6 sections where they explain to the public the general design and functionalities of the Ardor platform.

1. In the first section, they give a brief Introduction to the Nxt Software and its features. All of them are implemented due to the good and flexible design of Nxt.
2. In the second section, they talk about the possible limitations of the Nxt platform that they’ve identified, such as the need to use the same NXT token for most transactions, or the blockchain bloat problem, which is common for all other blockchain platforms due to the fact that every full node needs to store all transactions ever created since the blockchain was started, as well as re-process all of them when it downloads the blockchain for the first time. This creates a bottleneck that can only get worse when the size of the blockchain increases.
3. In the third section, they present a solution for the problem mentioned above. It consists of splitting between the “forging token” and the “transactional token”. In Ardor, a separation of these two functions is used to achieve much greater scalability by reducing blockchain bloat, and flexibility, by allowing multiple other transactional tokens to be used, which, in effect, allows custom “child chains” to exist and run on the same network of nodes.
4. In the fourth section, implementation details are given. Each node running the Ardor blockchain validates the transactions from all child chains, before they are pruned. A node downloading the blockchain from scratch will no longer be able to fully validate child chain transactions that have already been pruned. (it will only verify their hashes and ChildChainBlock transaction signature) However, this does not lower the overall blockchain security as it can still verify that the accounts who forged the blocks containing them were eligible to forge at that time, and therefore those transactions must have been validated by all up-to-date nodes while their data was still available. Child chain transactions will be pruned, but archival nodes can opt to be stored one or more child chains longer, or indefinitely. Periodically, each node will calculate a snapshot of the state of all derived objects, and a hash of this snapshot will be included in the current block by its forger. All nodes that are up-to-date and on the same fork already have exactly the same state, and thus will be able to verify this hash (and reject the block if invalid). A protocol will be defined by scanning which nodes are out-of-date, or are downloading the blockchain from scratch, then request the latest snapshot from up-to-date nodes, then validate it based on its hash being included in the blockchain, and finally download it in a decentralized manner. In this way, such nodes will catch up with the latest system state, thus bypassing the need to re-process all old transactions that are already pruned.
   
5. In the fifth section, gains and benefits are analyzed. Among them, we find the ability for the blockchain to scalae and the possibility to create our own personlized child chains, secured by the main chain, that will use their native token.
6. In the last section, the document explains the different implementation phases for Ardor that will start with its initial launch in the third quarter of 2017.

You can have a look at the full document to learn more details to learn more about Ardor.

Source and more information: https://www.jelurida.com/ardor-blockchain-platform-design

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• Google Chrome – Ardor Price

Taha Tawfik has announced his new development: an extension for Google Chrome that shows the price of Ardor, among some other functionalities, in this popular web browser. These are the features provided by this extension:

• Notify you if price goes higher or lower
• Handle over 33 currency as such (USD/JPY/INR/EUR/GBP)
• Handle high precision
• Quick-Links (Slack, ardorplatform.org, able to monitor the fiat equivalent of your wealth in Ardor instead of the price (1000 ARDR = $30)
• Allow you to select the refresh rate from 10s to once every 4 hours.

Source: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ardor-price/ipaidnnpbccoekihkcelmnnhnidhnpfd

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NXT IN THE MEDIA

• Gate of Bitcoin – NXT Coin, the Second Generation Cryptocurrency

This article written in German by KriptoGate, published on the platform Gate of Bitcoin, summarizes some of the many features of the pioneer 2.0 blockchain: Nxt. The text states some important milestones about the development of Nxt and explains some of the most popular features (such as the brain wallet, PoS, forging…) and explains why Nxt is a complete ecosystem for businesses and is much more that just a simple payment system.

The author also exposes some of the arguments used against Nxt (and PoS coins in general), such as the Nothing at Stake (NAS) attack. We’d like to point out here that there are some research into this field, such as the one carried out by Kushti and the Consensus Research team, that deemed this attack as unfeasible against the Nxt platform.

Note: The Jay wallet, which is referenced in the article, is not updated anymore. The Supernet wallet isn’t currently compatible with the Nxt API.

Source and more information: http://bitcoin.netzophren.de/nxt-coin-die-krypto-waehrung-der-zweiten-generation/

Nothing at Stake explained in 4 minutes

https://github.com/ConsensusResearch/articles-papers/blob/master/multistrategy/multistrategy.pdf

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• Steem It – The DAO Incident, Ardor (or NXT) and the Whole Confusion
  

Nivesh, writer of this article published at SteemIt, talks about the rise in price of cryptocurrencies such as Dash, Monero, Ripple, and even ETH, after going through the DAO incident. In the midst of this, NXT and Ardor have been quietly adapting and evolving.

The author offers a clear explanation about the features included in these two platforms:

NXT offers asset exchange so the ability to create tokens or trade in existing ones, it is also a data could which is protected by the blockchain; exclusive only to the owner of the address and there is a voting system as well…
The Ardor main chain will be where transaction processing for all child chains, including Ignis, will happen. The reason why transactions on the main chain will be minimized is to deal with the blockchain bloat issue. This issue is also addressed in the feature that child chain transactions will be pruned after a snapshot every 1440 blocks (~24 hours). However, child chains can choose to have all transaction details recorded through the use of an archival node…

Ardor and Ignis will be launched during the third quarter of this year. Ardor’s testnet has created a lot of expectation, making the price of both NXT and ARDR go up. What will happen once the mainnet is launched? Only time will tell…

Source and more information: https://steemit.com/ardr/@nivesh/the-dao-incident-ardor-or-nxt-and-the-whole-confusion

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PRICE EVOLUTION

• Aaron AG – NXT Technical Analysis

We’d like to point out that we are just echoing the opinion of an analyst because it’s referring to NXT. However, that doesn’t mean that Nxter approves nor disapproves this opinion. Investors are always responsible for doing the proper research and analyzing the risks when investing in volatile markets such as cryptocurrencies.

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• Lumbridgecity – Time to Invest in NXT and/or ARDR?

LumbridgeCity is a platform that aims to teach users how to trade cryptocurrencies on Poloniex. It includes Bitcoin Trading and CryptoCurrency Guides as well as Video Tutorials. It features updates covering Poloniex Margin Trading and Margin Lending markets and tutorials on basic technical analysis and live Poloniex Trading reports.

This week, they’ve introduced a new video analyzing the price of NXT and trying to foresee (always in their personal opinion) its future movements:

They’ve also release another video concerning ARDR’s price evolution:

More information: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnhc9BEete6WcgU0MvPoAKg

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