An OG cryptocurrency dating to 2014 is making an aggressive push towards interchain operability, following up the launch of a new privacy protocol and wrapped token bridge to Binance Smart Chain with the launch of yield farming last month.
Aimed at allowing frictionless and extremely cheap cross-border transactions, the fully decentralized Navcoin protocol launched a wrapped version of its NAV coins— Wrapped NAV, or wNAV — in April, building a bridge to the Binance Smart Chain, and through it to the world of decentralized finance (DeFi).
The Binance BEP-20 token wrap opens decentralized exchanges (DEX) to NAV and xNAV. Ultimately, the goal is to ensure that more wNAV liquidity is concentrated in DEXs. To that end, bridges to Solana and Ethereum are planned in the next 12 months.
The wrapped tokens followed March’s release of Navcoin’s new privacy protocol and the creation of a sister token, xNAV, priced one-to-one with NAV. Both NAV and xNAV can be swapped for wNAV.
The Wrapped NAV is then traded for PancakeSwap LP tokens and securely cold-staked in the users offline bridge wallet for farming on the Navcoin liquidity pool of PancakeSwap’s wNAV/BNB trading pair.
A history of robust privacy
Navcoin emerged in 2016 as a privacy-focused outgrowth of the two-year-old SummerCoin. It focused on helping users make anonymous transactions by hiding key transaction details, beginning with pioneering work on a technological solution that removed the link between coins sent and those received.
That led to what Navcoin calls its “unique and completely self-developed privacy protocol called Boneh-Lynn-Shacham Confidential Transactions (blsCT).” This protects users’ identity by combining two major privacy coin technical solutions: BLS signatures, which will be used in Ethereum 2.0 and is used by privacy coin Zcash’s zk-SNARK, and the Confidential Transactions used by Monero, among others.
More insights from Navcoin here
The xNAV privacy system works by having the node making a transaction send encrypted requests to other nodes, asking for coins to mix in with those in its initial transaction, thus obfuscating the amount of the transaction as well as breaking the link between payer and payee.
"The whole DeFi ecosystem is one of the most exciting revolutions crypto has seen in the last years and we are very excited to see Navcoin taking big steps to make our privacy features available for other DeFi tools and projects which actually have a lack of privacy," said Alex Vazquez, a Navcoin core developer.
Good governance
With roots that took seed just five years after Bitcoin’s genesis block, Navcoin has had time to develop into a fully decentralized autonomous organization — a DAO — in which all protocol administrative decisions and consensus changes are proposed and decided by an open and transparent voting system. The DAO process has been upgraded in the past year, and secret voting is in the process of being enabled.
Nor does Navcoin have overpowered voters, as the roughly 71 million extant NAV coins were mined from scratch rather than pre-mined or sold in an initial coin offering (ICO). It also moved from a proof-of-work consensus mechanism to proof-of-stake long ago, pre-dating the growing environmental concerns caused by power-hungry PoW.
NAV can be bought at Binance, Bittrex, PancakeSwap and more than a dozen other exchanges.
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