NavCoin 4.5.0 Is Now Available!

Kieren Hyland

13 Dec 2018

NavCoin 4.5.0 is now available for download! So make sure to upgrade your wallet to vote on the latest NavCoin features.

Key features of this release include soft forks for cold staking and static rewards, and a community fund interface in the NavCoin core wallet. If you would like to find out the full details, you can check out the 4.5.0 release notice on navcoin.org.

The road to Proof of Stake version 3

This update (if the soft forks activate) brings NavCoin in line with the Proof of Stake version 3 specifications. Proof of Stake version 3 was first developed by Pavel Vasin, and aims to better align the incentives of the network for improved security.

A guide to what’s in this release:

Cold Staking soft fork

You are now able to generate cold staking addresses.
At the moment there is a standard address type, and with the coins in this address you can both spend and/or stake from it.
A cold staking address is essentially a new type of wallet address - that has 2 private keys associated to it. One of which can stake, and one of which can spend.
So what does this allow? If you are staking the NavCoin network, you can now send your coins to a cold staking address for added protection.
This way you can use a cold/offline wallet to create your spending private key, and then stake the network with a ‘hot’ wallet (a hot wallet is one that’s connected to the internet e.g. NavPi/Core/NEXT).
Keeping your coins in a cold staking address allows your spending key to remain safely offline. Meaning that if your staking wallet was to be compromised in a hack, your coins would be safe, unlike with a standard address.

Static Rewards soft fork

Instead of using ‘coin age’ to determine how much NAV you receive when you stake, there is now a fixed 2 NAV reward. The aim of this is reward stakers that remain online and secure the network consistently.
In most cases, the amount of NAV received by stakers will increase.
Currently, you receive 4% on your balance per year. With static rewards, this could be in the range of 4-11% per year depending on how many other stakers there are.
Inflation will slightly increase compared to what it is now (currently around 1.2%). But because it is fixed, it diminishes over time (relative to the total supply).

Community Fund Interface

It’s now even easier to vote on community fund proposals!
You can now go into your wallet (either NavCoin Core, or NEXT), and use the interface to vote yes/no for proposals that have been submitted to the network.

Blockchain Headers

The wallet will now rate-limit the amount of block headers received from a single peer before banning them for misbehaving.

Download it now

So click here to download the latest version and upgrade your wallet now!