August 2017 (I)

Welcome back fellow Nxters, and to our new readers – welcome! Summer is here and we have a lot of exciting news to catch you up on. As always we provide you with the latest relevant and important news in the Nxt community.

This week we provide details about the imminent IGNIS ICO, warn you of a nefarious scam, and much more. You are in the right place to learn about the blockchain space as we provide basic intro information for new readers as well as up-to-date information for our old readers.

NXT COMMUNITY

• IGNIS – New Details about the ICO
  • IGNIS token sale and the SEC
  • JLRDA coins will be sold in batches
• Meetups – Riker in London, soon in Berlin
• Fake Tokens Alert

DEVELOPMENT

• NRS Update – Version 1.11.6
  • Ignis ICO page + new improvements
  • Print paperwallet
  • Updated Android client app
• Technical Roadmap – From Nxt to Ardor
• The Ardor API
• Weekly Reminder: No Handholding – Buyer Beware!

NXT AE

• Janus – Update
  • July dividend
  • Janus’ move to the Ardor platform
• Adel –  Update
• Bitswift – Pitch and Update

NXT IN THE MEDIA

• Ethereumworldnews – Top 5 Cryptocurrencies to Invest for the Moment
• Neocash Radio – NXT, ARDOR, IGNIS ICO Explained by Lior Yaffe Himself!
  
• Steemit – IGNIS ICO: What are your Options?

PRICE EVOLUTION

• TradingView – NXT Entry Levels
• Weekly NXT/ARDR Price Evolution

This week’s newsletter is put together by jagthegr (James), apenzl, rubenbc, jose.

NXT COMMUNITY

• IGNIS – New Details about the ICO

The IGNIS ICO is less than a week away. Beginning August 5 and lasting over the next month with four distinct batches, the ICO is in its final preparation stages.

The IGNIS token sale and the SEC

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued an investigative report concluding that DAO Tokens, a digital asset, were securities. Any sales of digital securities in the US must be subject to US laws as codified by the SEC. The precedent has been set that US securities laws may apply to other offers, sales, and trading of digital assets.

Luckily, IGNIS should be exempt from these laws as the SEC did not say every token is a security. From Riker – Lior Yaffe, Senior Dev at Jelurida IP BV, you read that IGNIS should not be considered a security and thus potential American investors in the ICO need not worry.

From the Nxt forums:

Lurker – How will this effect IGNIS ICO?

Riker – We have legal opinion from two different respectable law firms that the IGNIS token does not represent a security. It is an operational token.

For non-American investors, the SEC rulings are of no concern. Nonetheless, for the blockchain space to truly grow and become global, it will need to have an American involvement and participation.

Source

JLRDA coins will be sold in batches

Doubts have arisen over the distribution of the first round of JLRDA coins (placeholder of the IGNIS coin until Ardor and IGNIS launches), given the possibility that a whale buys the entire amount.

To reduce the risk of a “stampede” in the IGNIS ICO the initial batch of 60M will be phased in 12 equal offers of 5 million JLRDA (Ignis IOU tokens) approximately 12 hours apart from each other to allow for anyone who wants to participate in the ICO to be able to do so.

Riker states:

The issue of a “stampede” on the first 60M batch has been discussed before. It is indeed a likely scenario.

The default transaction sorting order is explain here https://nxtwiki.org/wiki/How_Tx_Processing_Works (section 4)

To reduce the risk of this happening and to allow anyone to participate, we will likely spread the first 60M batch into several different offers, say 12 offers of 5M Ignis published 12 hours apart over the course of the ICO week without announcement of specific block height to prevent taking advantage of phased transactions to skip the queue.

We here at Nxter wish Jelurida and Ignis the best of luck this week.

Source

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• Meetups – Riker in London, soon in Berlin

Riker attended the Nxt Roundtable Session on Monday July 31 in London, called: Moving on from Bitcoin: How Nxt Designed the Architecture for Blockchain’s Future Adoption. 

The talk covered the rapidly-changing technology within the blockchain space and Lior was featured in a cross-industry panel afterward. The meetup appears to have been a success, enlightening many eager attendees about the Nxt ecosystem and the future of the blockchain.

Also, last week we confirmed that Riker will speak at length in Berlin, on August 2nd, about the blockchain bloat problem and introduce the Ardor blockchain platform and the IGNIS ICO in the event: BigchainDB & IPDB: Token ICOs. 

His talk will cover the many benefits of the Ardor platform and explain how Ardor alone is solving the blockchain bloat problem and tie it into the incipient IGNIS ICO.

BigchainDB elaborates:

Lior will explain the blockchain bloat problem and introduce the Ardor blockchain platform which provides a unique and elegant solution to this problem. The talk will cover advanced topics in blockchain technology such as proof of stake, forging, child chains, bundling, pegged chains and archival nodes. Finally Lior will explain the Ignis ICO and wrap it all together.

Source 

Berlin info

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• Fake Tokens Warning

Last week we warned you, dear reader, about some scam tokens issued on the Nxt Monetary System and asked you to be aware when you scroll the currency pages of the NXT client.

There are many new people in our community and scammers take advantage of this and the decentralized nature of the platform by purposely making fake assets that mimic the originals.

Remember that a decentralized platform has no regulatory body. This means that there is no policing force out there ensuring the integrity and the safety of investor assets. It is the responsibility of the investor to perform his/her due diligence before making any move!

A user, confused by the situation proposed a model similar to waves and the community has not been slow in responding in kind about possible implementation of a central authority verifying assets.

Riker, on the Nxt forum:

Who will “verify” these assets? If Jelurida will verify every asset issued on NXT, should Jelurida charge a fee for this? Can someone bribe the Jelurida rep to list his asset by paying him behind the table? Can Jelurida extort asset issuer for listing their asset? And if a validated asset turns out to be a scam, can people sue Jelurida? These Waves validated assets is a bad idea.

Currency names are already unique (asset names are not, we fixed that when we introduced currencies).

But still someone switches a J with an R and people fall for it.

Should we post a warning to make sure the letters in the currency name are not switched? What if people ignore it? Should we post it on blinking Red? What if scammer now switch l with 1 and scam people there is no end to this.

martis:

I fully agree with @riker and waves check mark is a bad idea.
waves team get all responsibility by marking good assets and bad assets.

The Jelurida team has modified the published ICO text to remind investors not to fall victim to any scam. As awesome as our community is there are, as always, rotten people, who wish to make a quick dollar and will cheat and obfuscate the system in order to exploit others. The best we can do is provide highly visible warnings and as a community issue warnings like below to educate and warn as many people as possible.

FAKE TOKENS WARNING

It is possible that fake tokens with similar or the same name created by third parties also appear in other areas of the wallet such as the Asset Exchange or the Marketplace. Due to decentralized nature of the blockchain it is not possible to prevent the creation of such tokens and the Company shall not be held responsible for any losses or damages, or inability to receive IGNIS, arising from users purchasing such third party tokens.

THERE ARE NO PRE-SALES! THE ICO HAS NOT STARTED YET! WHEN IT STARTS, ALWAYS USE THE “IGNIS TOKEN SALE” LINK IN THE WALLET HEADER FOR PURCHASING OF JLRDA TOKENS!

All official information regarding the IGNIS ICO will be published on the Jelurida website. If you receive information from other sources always make sure that it is consistent with this page. In the case of discrepancy between the English text and any translation, the English version shall be considered the official and correct one.

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DEVELOPMENT

• NRS Update – Version 1.11.6

Jean-Luc, Nxt and Ardor lead core developer and a member of Jelurida, has released the latest version of the Nxt Reference Software. The changelog includes the new Jelurida Public License.

This release is a mandatory upgrade. A hard fork will be scheduled at the Ardor Genesis Snapshot block, expected to be set some time after the end of the IGNIS token sale. At that time, nodes running 1.11.5 or older will be left on a fork.

Kristina Kalcheva, Jelurida co-founder, managing director and legal expert, states:

v1.11.6 is the first NRS version released under the JPL.

Future Nxt clones must give 10% to NXT holders.

Note that from this version on, the official Nxt packages and source code will also be hosted under the Jelurida bitbucket repository, https://bitbucket.org/Jelurida/nxt/downloads.

Ignis ICO Page + New Improvements

Full changelog

With the IGNIS token sale beginning August 5th, the Ignis ICO page has been added.

Avoid Asset Exchange-, Monetary System-, and Nxt Marketplace scammers by simply using the ICO page.

Buying NXT is accessible across third party exchanges Changelly and Shapeshift with the newly implemented integrations.

Print Paperwallet

Riker explains:

The paperwallet link is available when you log in using your passphrase and check the “Remember Me” checkbox, otherwise the passphrase in not available for the browser so it cannot generate the paper wallet.

Updated Android Client App

Android ap: https://bitbucket.org/Jelurida/nxt/downloads/nxt-client-1.11.6.apk
sha256 9ec52d8870c7d20acf32e51ff50cf24f2036a6eb9e403ecb98322fb030f51f97

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• Technical Roadmap – From Nxt to Ardor

Jelurida released a nice infographic detailing the genesis of Nxt, Ardor and the future to come.

Source

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• The Ardor API

The Ardor API, the most important part of the Ardor platform, allows interaction with Ardor nodes using HTTP requests to port 27876. Most HTTP requests can use either the GET or POST methods, but some API calls accept only the POST method for security reasons. Responses are returned as JSON objects.

Most Ardor API are similar to the NXT API described here the changes to existing NXT API are explained in the Ardor migration page Each new Ardor API call is documented below, with definitions given for HTTP request parameters and JSON response fields, followed by an example:

• • • The JSON response fields are each followed by one of S for string, A for array, O for object, N for number or B for boolean.
    • In the examples, the Nxt node is represented as localhost and requests and responses are formatted for easy reading; line breaks and spaces are not actually used except in some parameter values. All requests are in URL format which implies the HTTP GET method. When GET is allowed, the URL can be entered into a browser URL field but proper URL encoding is usually required (e.g., spaces in a parameter value must be replaced by + or %20). Otherwise, the URL should be used as a guide to preparing an HTTP POST request using cURL, for example.

All API calls can be viewed and tested at http://localhost:27876/test while the local server node is running. For specific API calls, use http://localhost:27876/test?requestType=specificRequestType.

This document corresponds to Ardor version 2.0.3e.

Source

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• Weekly Reminder: No Handholding – Buyer Beware!

Let’s break it down once again.

marenkar – People entering into cryptocurrency should understand that with independence comes responsibility.

Everyone forgets things, we are only human and our brains are only so big. This week’s helpful reminder is of the non exclusivity of asset names. Scammers are out there and shady people want to defraud you – so verify the identity of the asset issuing accounts you are transacting with and always verify the asset ID before investing your hard earned money on the AE.

PLUS:

if someone issued a promising asset they did probably NOT also isssue an MS coin or a Marketplace goodie with the same name.

From the Nxt forums

riker – Historically there were 3 types of entities used to scam people: Assets, Currencies and Marketplace goods.

Whenever someone creates an attractive entity of one of the types, scammers try to use the other types to scam people or trick them into using a different but similar entity of the same type.

In the past there was sort of protocol that asset issuer followed of issuing asset announcement on the NXT forum and there was even a team of trusted advisers that checked asset issuer and filtered out scammers. This group wasn’t associated with the devs or the foundation though and since this wasn’t a profitable business it was abandoned.

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NXT AE

• Janus Update

July Dividend

Our friends at Janus, a Nxt based token, announced that there will only be a dividend distribution upcoming if there is a monthly profit at each of their two profit-sharing casinos. Their financial analysis is now done and here’s their announcement to the community:

ascendus [5:15 PM]:

*FYI* : We have made a small profit on BetterBets.io casino. Profit share will be distributed as soon as bjorn returns from a short trip.

Janus’ dividend history

Janus’ move to the Ardor platform

As announced, the Janus project will make use of Ardor’s upon launch of the Ardor mainnet.

Therefore, Janus, JanusXT, and ComJNSXT trading will be frozen on the Nxt Asset Exchange at the Ardor Genesis Snapshot block. Trading and transferring of the assets on the Nxt blockchain will be disabled, and existing ask/bid orders canceled automatically at that time. From the snapshot until Ardor launch, there will be no way to trade them.

The list of assets to be frozen on the Nxt Blockchain is hardcoded into NRS 1.11.6 and includes:

Janus: 4348103880042995903
JanusXT: 14572747084550678873
ComJNSXT: 13363533560620557665

In addition to becoming tradable on IGNIS, Janus tokens will also be tradable on any other child chain.

Janus Roadmap

ae-Janus-4348103880042995903

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• Adel – Update

Last week was eventful for the Adel community. They announced revisions and updates to their portal and landing page and continue to work with Jelurida in order to be able to upgrade in the near future.

In their own words:

We covered a lot on our mastermind call this week. Here’s a summary:

*Community Portal Update*

We are continuing to improve the Account module with real-time ADL statistics. We will also allow 3 Nxt addresses per account – each address needs to be confirmed and validated.
Collaboration module is in process. We are working with off-the-shelf Wiki software and slack-based forum interface. As an interim solution, we will be using google docs to incubate ideas.
We presented our business process flow that will be used in the collaboration module, as it relates to community, admins and Project Review Committee involvement.

*Home Page Development*

The home page is currently being redesigned with upgraded graphics. We are streamlining the site for future growth and showcasing our community projects.
The back-end is also being upgraded from AngularJS to Angular2, and we will also have an integrated CRM.

*Content Creation*

There are two new video presentations on their way – The first is our presentation at the Bitcoin & Blockchain Conference in Prague in May 2017, with over 700 in attendance. Then we will release part two of our Dutch Banking Presentation held in June 2017.
A video Interview will be scheduled with Brian Donegan from the IoM government to discuss Adel and the potential for project incubation in blockchain. Members have been asked to contribute questions this week.

*Marketing Press & Events*

We are working with Jelurida on our upgrade plans to Ardor in Q1 2018.

Adel has secured a speaker slot at the Bitcoin & Blockchain Conference in Stockholm, Sweden on September 7th, and Adel will also be exhibiting at the Web Summit from Nov 6-9 in Lisbon, Portugal.

Speaker opportunities – please let us know if we can speak at any blockchain events.
Our goal is to attract 300 members by June 2018. How do we attract new members? Help us spread the word about Adel’s incubator. The more members we have, the more expertise will be available to contribute to the idea incubation (I2) and project planning (P2) initiatives.

More info

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• Bitswift – Update and Pitch

Bitswift, the newest member of the Nxt/Ardor ecosystem was approved as an official HP Canada Parter last week! They continue to develop their store and platform as they look ahead to providing their services across Canada.

In their own words

Bitswift Tech Solutions is now an approved HP Canada Partner:
Your HP Canada Partner Agreement Application was approved on 07/27/2017.

Are you still wondering what Bitswift actually is?

User bitswiftbro explains Bitswift and what value they want to provide their clients:

Bitswift is a token with focus set on integrating blockchain into business and into general public.

We will accomplish this through our companies and community.

Our store will bring value in itself to the tokens, but the real value from the store will come from the fact that we will be able to show all the other businesses we work with that “its ok to accept this stuff, and we are here to help if you need”.

Store will initially launch accepting legacy payment options and Bitcoin, once we have all the logistics sorted, we will add Bitswift to it, both as a payment option and a rewards option. 2% discount on everything through the store when paying with Bitswift sounds nice. We have not quite formalized those details yet though, still busy with everything else like getting more partners and distributors on board.

The real value will come from the business relationships we are forming along the way. If our reps are establishing client relationships and building trust, while supporting companies tech infrastructure and making the tech decisions on behalf of the client, it will be easy to recommend to our clients to give Bitswift a try. First we need to get our software to where it needs to be, so that is part of the reason of moving in with Ardor, so we can start building on solid foundations and bring this stuff to the public and start integrating it into business.

– Our target user base will be the general public, not the crypto-currency / blockchain nerds. We will approach them through our companies at a business level, as they are already approaching us with the Bitcoin and blockchain questions.

– Part of the reason to move within Ardor, so we can focus on our application which will add utility and value to our tokens, rather than on the blockchain infrastructure.

Bitswift’s token swap will still occur on Friday, August 11. Exciting times lie ahead for Bitswift and we are happy to continue updating you about them and other Nxt/Ardor based blockchain companies.

Token swap happens on Bittrex @ : Los Angeles (USA – California) Friday, August 11, 2017 at 6:00:00 pm PDT UTC-7 hours
Peterborough (Canada – Ontario) Friday, August 11, 2017 at 9:00:00 pm EDT UTC-4 hours
Corresponding UTC (GMT) Saturday, August 12, 2017 at 01:00:00

Source

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NXT IN THE MEDIA

• Ethereumworldnews – Top 5 Cryptocurrencies To Invest For The Moment

On the Ethereum portal, an article was released that documented the hottest cryptocurrencies. Ardor made the list.

The more press Ardor gets the better everyone will be because Jelurida will have more capital to reinvest back into the platoform. The IGNIS ICO is August 5.

Ardor

Dubbed as NXT 2.0 – Ardor is a scalable blockchain platform that natively supports a wide range of features including transaction aliasing, blockchain storage, account management, privacy based coin mixing, voting and built in marketplace creation. However the stand out feature that makes Ardor a truly innovative project is its implementation of child chains.

The introduction of child chains opens up great levels of customisation and enables each child chain (which could be a company, private/ public organisation, institution, group etc) to run its own self contained blockchain ecosystem whilst still benefitting from all the core features of Ardor itself. These features can also be turned on and off as per the requirements of that given project making it a very attractive platform for a wide range of use cases.

This flexibility will truly be a game changer in the crypto space as businesses looking at blockchain solutions will no longer have to choose a one size fits all approach on a shared blockchain but instead are given creative freedom to build child chains that suit their very specific needs and security requirements.

The project has the crypto community very excited and already has a healthy market which is pegged to explode in Q3 2017 when the Ardor mainnet launches.

Source

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• Neocash Radio – NXT, ARDOR, IGNIS ICO Explained, by Lior Yaffe Himself!

Neocash radio conducted an interview with Riker as he continues to tour the Continent ahead of the upcoming ICO. Highlights from the interview are below.

Built on the same technology as NXT, ARDOR will operate in a fundamentally different manner. ARDOR will create and maintain a standard full-length blockchain but the functions and features will be limited to security and record keeping. Built on top of ARDOR will be child-chains that maintain pruned blockchains consisting of only the last 24 hours worth of blocks or less. These child-chains will reconcile their transaction balances periodically with the ARDOR parent-chain through bundle contracts. Once a log of the transaction data has been secured on ARDOR the child-chains can then prune older blocks.

It is important to note that the child-chains only store transaction data on the ARDOR parent-chain. All features and functions that do not impact account balances are handled on the child-chain exclusively and can be pruned as needed. Basically ARDOR will keep track of which coins or assets are in which address at this point in time but little more.

The child-chain offers a bundle contract to prospective Bundlers when it is time to add a snapshot to the ARDOR parent-chain. The first child-chain is set to be IGNIS, so in this scenario the manager or operator of IGNIS would offer a Bundler 100 IGNIS tokens to add transaction data to the parent-chain. The Bundler would then pay a fee in ARDOR to have that transaction data added into an ARDOR block. In effect you have a flow of IGNIS tokens out of the child-chain and the consumption of ARDOR tokens for security. The Bundler can then keep the IGNIS or trade it for more ARDOR on the exchanges built into the protocol.

Jelurida is the name of the company that was formed to develop the ARDOR protocol. As part of the launch of ARDOR the initial (ARDR) tokens were distributed on the NXT platform at a ratio of 1 NXT : 1 ARDR. Those tokens will be migrated to the ARDOR platform at the launch later this year. The process will require a hardfork on the NXT blockchain during which ARDR tokens will be locked in their addresses and cannot be moved. Once the process is complete users will be able to log into the ARDOR platform with their NXT credentials and access their tokens.

Listen to the interview

To help fund the further development of the ARDOR platform and child-chains like IGNIS the Jelurida team is holding an Initial Coin Offering where 440,000,000 IGNIS tokens will be sold to the public. The ICO will start on August 5th, 2017 and occur on the NXT platform using the built-in asset exchange functions.

Once the sale has elapsed or completed any remaining unsold IGNIS combined with 500 million more will be distributed to those addresses holding NXT at a rate of about 0.5 IGNIS per NXT.

So even if a NXT holder did not participate in the ICO they would still receive IGNIS.

Source

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• Steemit – IGNIS ICO: What are your options?

From Steemit comes a detailed explainer on the options for the IGNIS ICO, including the schedules and batch amounts.

Source

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PRICE EVOLUTION

• TradingView – NXT Entry Levels

Source

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• Weekly NXT/ARDR Price Evolution

The following graphic shows the NXT / Bitcoin exchange price at Poloniex over this past week

The following graphic shows the ARDR / Bitcoin exchange rate at Poloniex over the past week

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That wraps up the news for the week. Upcoming we will analyze the IGNIS ICO. Stay tuned for next week as we continue to provide you with all the relevant and exciting news for Nxt, Ardor, and all things involving the accelerating growth of the blockchain space. We love our community, we would be nothing without you guys/gals!

Follow us on Twitter for important breaking updates during the week as they happen. Stay committed and stay informed fellow Nxters! Big things are happening and we are looking into providing more original content for you to consume. See you next week!