Wikipedia:NKN (software)

NKN, or New Kind of Network, is an open-source protocol for public blockchain-based peer-to-peer network to share unused bandwidth and Internet connectivity.

Technique
NKN uses a global addressing scheme based on public key, in order to enable direct peer to peer communication without centralized servers. The routing of packets is based on Chord Distributed Hash Table (DHT), which maps each NKN address to a random and verifiable position on the Chord DHT ring.

Consensus
NKN’s consensus algorithm is based on Cellular Automata, A New Kind of Science and Ising Model, where a simple local majority rule can lead to system level convergence in a small number of iterations. The design goal is to scale to arbitrary numbers of equal consensus nodes.

Milestone
The project was launched in January 2018 and lists Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha, and Whitfield Diffie, inventor of public key cryptography as advisors.NKN Mainnet was launched in July 2019.

The US GSMA reported that NKN and China Telecommunications Corporation reached a cooperation and applied nCDN to provide a new type of file transmission method to one of the Tier-1 online video platforms.

NKN signed a deal with Baidu-Owned Video Streaming company iQiyi on Apr 14, 2020.