Happy 4th Birthday Nimiq!

“love ai amor mohabbat hubun cinta lyubov bhalabasa amour kauna pi'ara liebe eshq upendo prema amore katresnan sarang anpu prema yeu”

Four years ago, the first block was mined on the Nimiq Blockchain. ‘Love’ in as many languages as possible will forever be its message, see https://nimiq.watch/#1

Since then, Nimiq has grown, found fans and contributors all around the world and has succeeded in creating and shipping innovations that can bring decentralized payments to everyone.

But nobody is interested in self-glorifying marketing statements so we will keep this post crisp, informative and humble – much is left to do. At the same time, there is much to celebrate:

New Website

On our eternal quest to improve marketing, the team is excited to release our new website.

The overall structure was updated to properly represent Nimiq’s past and future developments. Most noticeably, there is more focus on our Apps. SuperSimpleSwap.com, Cryptopayment.link and of course the Nimiq Wallet are now more accessible and embedded in proper product pages that allow for professional (SEO) marketing.

Overall, the design has become more mature in terms of colors and shapes.

Reflecting on a more agile approach to our releases is the MVP state of the page. It currently only features the essential pages and will see regular and extensive updates in the coming weeks and months – backed by more marketing-oriented tracking.

Speaking of upcoming releases...

New Developer Experience

Finally, a long-standing wish of the team and at least parts of the community will be fulfilled: A state-of-the-art developer experience featuring improved docs, tutorials, guides and bug bounties.

While designed to support validators, OASIS implementers and blockchain beginners, it is planned to provide more transparency. Maybe even more importantly – it will feature more opportunities for the community to contribute, from wallet bug reports to Nimiq 2.0.

Check out the first designs.

TEN31 KYC

Another longstanding request is about to be answered: Together with our partner TEN31, we are about to launch a KYC option. Once KYC’d with TEN31, you will be able to profit from higher limits for crypto-fiat swaps in the wallet, on SuperSimpleSwap.com and on all upcoming products of TEN31 and Nimiq, including the upcoming ‘Nimiq for Bluecode’ app.

Still, we will never compromise on decentralization. KYC will always be optional. Registration-free access to all crucial functionality of the Nimiq payment system remains sacred.

Development is largely done, legal and operational details are currently being finalized and closed testing is about to start.

Cryptopayment.link V2

Nimiq’s Cryptopayment.link started as a bit of an experiment. We wanted to create a super simple way for people to accept crypto. The underlying idea was that there are many people in the world for whom investing in anything, let alone crypto, is simply impossible. These people shouldn’t be excluded from the financial revolution.

Cryptopayment.link, or CPL for short, gives those people a tool to sell their services or goods for crypto, even if it’s just every once in a while.

You can check the current version, it has been live for a while now and currently handles about 40 payments per day. Baby steps, but the interest is growing and various merchants approached us with ideas for improvements and features requests.

We’re therefore happy to announce that V2 of CPL is likely to release still this April. It will feature a significantly faster UX, an admin dashboard and an ‘accept-only’ view to be used by staff members.

As its release is just around the corner, no teasers on this one.

SuperSimpleReferrals

We are convinced that SuperSimpleSwap is a solution capable of conquering a significant share of the global crypto buying and selling volume. More fiat and cryptocurrencies are planned to be added, the limits are about to be raised by optional KYC sign-up and third-party integrations are becoming more tangible as the system hardens.

While we continue to see overwhelming feedback and interest from potential third-party integrators when presenting it e.g. at the Blockchance conference, our basic idea for marketing is a grassroots approach.

That means you, reading this article, are invited to help us spread the word. Let’s enable our peers with a way of buying and selling that doesn’t require an exchange or any other middlemen.

Don’t worry, you’re not supposed to do it for free. With SuperSimpleReferrals, we offer anyone to receive a cut of the fees earned. This will be possible via referral links, a customizable widget and a properly documented API for deep integrations. A dashboard will provide analytics and data exports and even the smallest amount earned can be paid out.

The backend functionality is done, the designs are ready, our frontend team will start the implementation by the end of this month.

Here are some sneak peeks:

Vision Workshop

Every once in a while, a good hard look in the mirror is in place for every human, company, crypto project. Early this year, Nimiq did just that.

In what felt like very honest, self-critical and externally supported workshops sessions, no stone was left unturned. Major changes to the current priorities, goals and structures were discussed and, in part, agreed on.

It is too early to get into details, a proper update on our refreshed mission and what it means will follow in due time – at its core, however, stands interoperability.

Nimiq 2.0

Probably the most complex, game-changing and anticipated upgrade for Nimiq: Nimiq 2.0.

We know everybody is eager to know the launch date, we are too. Last year we were able to publish the first release candidate of the devnet. For the first time, we saw 2.0 validators running in a real network producing blocks. Amazingly, in a matter of hours, we were able to produce more blocks than the 1.0 chain has produced so far.

We are getting closer by the day, improving stability and fine-tuning the operation of the Devnet Nimiq Nodes. We cannot communicate an official date until we have reached the level of stability and performance that we expect from this upgrade. To keep our supporters in the loop, we started to share frequent progress updates over our Official Twitter account. Here is a summary of the recent milestones completed:

Improving stability has been the main focus in the last couple of months. While running tests on the current Nimiq 2.0 implementation, Nimiq blockchain developers found performance decreased after a certain amount of data has been processed.

After solving different issues and improving the general functionality of the nodes, it became clear that a source of instability was Macro Block Creation, Database Size and Disk Usage by the nodes. Several improvements have been made on this front, including the change from LMDB to MDBX and the creation of a non-history node.

Once the nodes reached a stable state our blockchain developers began Stress Testing. This includes working on improving testing coverage and setting up a complete monitoring stack for the Nimiq 2.0 infrastructure. Also integrating an albatross stress test tool built by RedManer, a community dev (thanks!).

Still, there are many bugs lurking around and we need to include functionality to prevent malicious attacks, but given the complexity of proof-of-stake blockchains, it's worth celebrating all these achievements and keep the hard work to release the 2.0 chain. Excited as we are, we need to tread lightly and keep working to reach our final go: an eco-friendly, energy-efficient and performant payment network that is ready to scale and process transactions for all of humanity!

New team members

Lastly, we’d like to take the opportunity to introduce and welcome our latest additions to the team:

Michael is a long standing community member and joins the team as a sales representative and community manager.

Roberto joins the marketing team too and will focus on partnerships, especially the onboarding of new stores to accept NIM.

Maxi is a frontend developer and the latest addition to Nimiq’s tech team. His first bigger project is the new website.

That’s it, the birthday update for our four-year-old. Let’s work together to help the kid grow so that it may take care of us when we’re old.

Pura Vida,

Team Nimiq