Within a month of its existence, the NXT Foundation became one of the three platinum sponsors of the Mind the Gap Expo that is taking place on April 10, 2015. The foundation is also set to be the official cryptocurrency partner at the PayExpo later on in June.

The number of startups around Nxt, a second-generation cryptocurrency, has been steadily growing in the recent months, as has adoption by users and merchants. It is partly due to these successes that five members of the Nxt community saw the need to incorporate a foundation. 

The group has been working informally on smaller projects and initiatives in the community for over ten months before registering formally in March 2015 in the Netherlands.

According to Bas Wisselink, one of the founding directors, the foundation will continue supporting, promoting and educating the public about the cryptocurrency platform. It will also try to get businesses and developers involved with Nxt.  And most importantly, it will present all information and tools coherently for easy use by the community and the public at large.

The Foundation Is Separate from the Nxt Cryptocurrency

Wisselink is quick to point out that the foundation will never be in charge of the Nxt community. It also has nothing to do with the technical developing and management of the Nxt platform. He says:

“The Foundation exists as a point of contact and as a means of streamlining information. Nxt as a community is very decentral, and it's very hard to get the info people need quickly and easily. We have taken the task to get this organized, connect people to the people they need and help them understand how to use it. We identify more with the Linux Foundation. Nxt has been called the Linux of Crypto anyway.”

He further contends that the foundation does not want to overreach or take a mandate that it cannot manage. It has only chosen a niche and left everything else to others who are better suited.

For transparency, the foundation seeks to use the voting system and enhanced multisig feature known as 2-Phasing in the latest Nxt release. With this technology, voting is done on the blockchain where everyone can see.

Proof of Stake at Stake

Nxt was launched in November 2013 and relies on the proof-of-stake principle to validate transactions on its blockchain. This is different from proof of work, which is used by Bitcoin and other first-generation crypto coins.

The founders of Nxt were inspired by the need to overcome some of the difficulties experienced by the Bitcoin community. One of these is the amount of power required to maintain the network.

By using the principle of proof of stake, the Nxt network avoids being energy or power intensive. This is accomplished by randomly picking accounts that hold coins, or stake, in the network to author or forge the next blocks in the chain of transactions. Confirmations are fast and take only about a minute, compared to ten minutes for the proof-of-work process used to verify Bitcoin transactions.

Indeed, there is no mining with Nxt. One billion coins were premined and distributed to 73 original stakeholders in an IPO-like awarding. These initial stakeholders in turn were given the task of distributing and spreading the coins to other adopters.

Popular Nxt Solutions

Services that have been built on the platform and are popular with users and enthusiasts include the colored coins concept, which provides the basis for an asset exchange that allows businesses and individuals to raise and distribute capital securely and easily.

There is also an embedded messaging system that is used to transfer and store data as part of a smart contracts implementation.

The impact of the creation of the NXT Foundation and its activities will only be ascertained in time. Nevertheless, there is every indication that things are not going to be the same within the modest Nxt community.

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