Navio: Private Finance Ecosystem With World’s First Proof-of-Private-Stake (PoPS)
Navio, formerly Navcoin, is a blockchain ecosystem focused on privacy. We are aiming to empower individuals by providing them with a secure, decentralized and private means of conducting transactions, facilitated by our self-developed blsCT protocol and the Proof-of-Private-Stake (PoPS) consensus mechanism; the testnet has been launched recently.
PoPS is compatible with Confidential Schemes and facilitates Pedersen Commitments to hide transaction amounts. Neither the staked amount nor the identity of the staker are revealed; any transaction in the Navio ecosystem is private-by-default. Also, it will be possible to bridge our privacy features to pseudonymous blockchains.
In the past months and even years we have seen more and more cases of developers being detained or even jailed, just because they were working on privacy-oriented solutions, such as Alexey Pertsev and Roman Storm who were ‘Co-Founders’ of Tornado Cash, the Ethereum mixing protocol, as well as the Samourai Wallet founders, who were working on a privacy-focused Bitcoin Wallet for a long time .
It is time that we are fighting back!
Navio: Fighting For Financial Privacy
We believe in the power of decentralization and the right to privacy, and we strive to create a world where these values are upheld.
Our core principles are centered around transparency, community, and innovation. We are committed to being open and honest in all our actions and decisions, and we value the input and involvement of our community members; which was also one of the reasons that we, as a community, decided to rebrand from Navcoin to ‘Navio’, which goes hand in hand with our evolving technology and the new chain.
We believe that individuals have the right to keep their financial transactions and data private, and we have developed cutting-edge technology to ensure that this right is protected, currently running the world’s first Proof-of-Private-Stake (PoPS) in testnet stage.
What is ‘Proof-of-Private-Stake’ (PoPS?)
PoPS (Proof-of-Private-Stake) is a privacy-focused consensus mechanism that integrates confidential schemes with Pedersen Commitments to conceal transaction amounts and ensures that the staked amount and the staker's identity remain hidden.
A key feature of PoPS is coin locking. When coins are locked, they serve as collateral for the participation in staking for the upcoming epochs. Once the epoch is completed, they will be unlocked and accessible for further transactions.
While there are other teams working on private-by-default staking solutions, all of them are using a hybrid Proof-of-Work (PoW) / Proof-of-Stake (PoS) approach, which differs a lot from Navio, as Navio operates with a pure Private Proof-of-Stake (PoPS), the first solution of its kind, worldwide.
If you want to dig a bit more into the technical details, you can have a look at the current academic paper draft here: [Upload the PDF somewhere and insert the link]
What Are Navio’s Use Cases?
Private Payments: NAV, the privacy coin of the Navio blockchain, ensures all payments are private by default, concealing the sender, receiver, and amount. All transactions are fast, scalable, and cost-effective.
Maintaining private payments is essential for financial freedom. Unlike Bitcoin and other pseudonymous cryptocurrencies, where transactions can be traced and identities linked, Navio guarantees full anonymity.
Interoperability & DeFi: Any existing token from other ecosystems such as Ethereum, Avalanche, BSC and more can be bridged onto the Navio blockchain to benefit from our privacy shield.
The core ethos of decentralized finance, autonomy and self-sovereignty, are most effectively upheld by empowering users with anonymity. As such, if a network lacks proper privacy, Navio ensures privacy is brought onto its token.
Private Tokens: Private tokens are a unique feature of the Navio ecosystem, allowing anyone to mint their own privacy-preserving tokens using our blsCT protocol.
Transactions involving these tokens are as private as standard NAV transactions, obfuscating details such as token balance, sent amounts, recipients, and the source of funds.
Private NFTs: Private NFTs offer confidential ownership by concealing asset and transaction details. Unlike traditional NFTs, which expose ownership and transaction histories publicly, private NFTs shield this information from being traced.
Ownership, transfers, and authenticity are securely validated on-chain, all while keeping sensitive data completely hidden.
Overall, the Navio protocol can cover a lot of different use cases, especially due to the fact that its privacy features can be bridged to pseudonymous blockchains, while enabling private staking. For developers of decentralized applications (dApps) who are focused on privacy it is definitely interesting!
Interested? Check Out The Navio Testnet!
If you are interested in playing around with our testnet, here you will find a detailed documentation.
The testnet launch is not impacting the current mainnet; which operates with NAV, xNAV (for private transactions) and wNAV (the wrapped version on BSC); on the way forward, there will just be one currency that offers privacy-by default; the new parameters will be the following:
Network: Navio
Currency: NAVIO
Ticker: $NAV
Interested in updates regarding the testnet/mainnet progress, the upcoming swap, Navio’s technology and development? Any questions, at all?
Then feel free to join our new Discord & follow us on X for more updates!
Why I Work With Navio
Navio, formerly Navcoin, has been around since many years and has been consistently building privacy solutions, without feeling the need to activate resources like VC money, etc. - it is a group of dedicated people, talented developers and privacy fighters, that I have been following for 7 years now (met them first in person in Germany in 2017) and actively supporting since more than 2 years.
We will continue to build privacy-tech without compromise, deliver a high-utility privacy-first platform with technology (PoPS) that is unique, educate people, i.e. through the Private Finance Syndicate (PFS) that we have founded together with LunarDAO, work with like-minded people, build partnerships and collaborations … long story short, to fight for what is rightfully ours:
The right to (financial) privacy!