Alex Vazquez Interview: NavCoin
June 1, 2019
NavCoin is an open-source, blockchain based Proof-of-Stake cryptocurrency. NavCoin ecosystem includes multiple projects, from wallets to the unique decentralized governance tool called NavCoin Community Fund.
Started in far 2014, NavCoin is continuously growing for its community and by its community. But what is going on with NavCoin now?
Let’s ask Alex Vazquez, NavСoin community developer. Alex has been working on NavCoin for more than two years.
Thanks for joining us today, Alex. NavCoin is a wonderful example of a community-driven coin. The amount of people who contributed to NavCoin through all these years is quite impressive. Undoubtedly, people are what make any coin successful. According to your estimations, how many people are working on NavCoin now?
It’s very hard to estimate the amount of people contributing to the project. Being a completely decentralized project where everyone can freely contribute, there’s no registry on who’s a member - there’s no concept of membership. I could provide you some numbers about the developers which contribute to the navcoin-core repository (this is information publicly available on GitHub, 21 contributors), but the project is way more than that. We can’t forget about the many providing support in our public channels, local ambassadors working to expand our community or even node operators who help securing the network. Then we could perfectly talk about hundreds of individuals actively participating in the project.
The NavCoin Community Fund is a decentralized way to support the community initiatives. But what exactly makes it more decentralized than other similar funding models?
One of the most fascinating things from NavCoins’ Funding system is how low the entry barrier is. Instead of restricting participation in the voting process to a portion of the network, like masternode operators, every validator node can take part in the governance process. The voting weight will depend on the amount of coins used for staking, it’s the only requirement. Everybody can join and participate.
The Community Fund looks incredible for making the NavCoin governance more democratic. What are the plans to improve the CF even further?
We are looking into turning the community fund in a full governance system. Until now its use has been restricted to decisions around the use of a reserved amount of coins in various initiatives related to the project. But we aim to expand its features so the network can also see decentralised consultations and decide on consensus parameters without intervention from the developers. There’s a proposal being currently discussed.
Let’s talk more about privacy. The new ZeroCT privacy protocol looks interesting. Could you tell a little about the new privacy protocol and what’s going on with it?
ZeroCT provides very high levels of anonymity; I could feel the excitement of NavCoin finally having its own on-chain privacy protocol. Sadly the Zerocoin protocol which ZeroCT was based on was proven to be broken in one of its elemental cryptographic proofs. This started a debate on the community, which is still ongoing about what is the desirable level of privacy we want and how to deal with the risks of possible bugs present in novel technologies creating hidden inflation.
There is a debate over privacy and auditability issues in private blockchains. What do you think about these issues?
Tim Ruffing said recently that every privacy coin has a chance of suffering a hidden inflation bug. I agree with that. I also agree that a cryptocurrency could lose its store of value condition if its supply is not transparent/auditable. But I firmly believe transaction amount obfuscation is necessary for providing a minimum reasonable of privacy. Then auditing the supply is a more complicated task, which could require some extra cryptographic assumptions and specially increase the source code complexity. The answer to this question is very tied to the nature of each project. Personally, I would like to see NavCoin with very strong privacy features.
What milestones are there for NavCoin in 2019?
I’m very happy to say we’ve been very active from a technical perspective during last year’s bear market. We saw amazing new features like Open Alias, Cold Staking or the Community Fund come to fruition. We will keep on working on expanding the technical side of NavCoin, improving the existing protocols and researching around new ones. But I think 2019 should be specially important from other perspectives like communication and education. We have very strong fundamentals and are in a very good position for seeing a very strong growth across the year.
In your opinion, what else makes NavCoin stand out?
NavCoin’s biggest strength is its decentralized nature. There could be other projects more advanced technically, with a strong marketing team or strong venture capitalists behind. Can’t negate that. But I have to say that nothing is more important for a project’s long term sustainability than its governance. But I have to say that nothing is more important for a project’s long term sustainability than its governance. Centralized power is weak and will run away as soon as their pockets are full, leaving nothing behind. I’m very happy NavCoin does not depend on any individual efforts or decisions to progress. From my point of view this is what makes us have a very long life expectancy.
Finally, what are your thoughts on the future of privacy coins? For example, the adoption or technological challenges.
I think privacy coins are going to bring a lot of innovation in form of new privacy-preserving technologies which are going to be beneficial for users not only in the scope of value transfer use cases but additionally on other contexts too. The recent guidance from FinCEN is really reasonable for privacy coins, it sets clearance on where are the limits of regulation and the importance of protecting user rights. I’m not worried about an eventual ban on privacy coins at the exchange level as some pointed.
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Thanks to Alex, we had a wonderful interview to stay updated with NavCoin news.
Here are some useful links to learn more about NavCoin:
You can buy NavCoin at Binance or Changelly exchanges.
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