This update will cover PKT technology development through
Q1 2022.
PKT is an open-source project. All of the PKT blockchain code and the various projects being developed in the PKT ecosystem are managed by contributing community members.
PKT is the world’s first and only layer-1 blockchain for bandwidth. Let’s first unpack what this means. A layer-1 refers to a base network and its core infrastructure that can validate transactions without using another underlying network. This means that PKT doesn’t rely on any other blockchain for validation or infrastructure. This puts PKT on par with all other layer-1 projects such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, etc, which have vast ecosystems, utility and have gained global notoriety.
Occasionally, people ask why launch a layer-1, when other projects have gained quicker adoption as a layer-2? The answer to this question is PacketCrypt, which is PKT’s bandwidth-based proof of work. This technology validates the blockchain, ensures fair issuance, and economically incentivizes the growth of PKT’s high-speed, decentralized network. Of course, each PKT pool and announcement miner is centralized in their own regard, but since setting up a pool or announcement miner is entirely permissionless, the PKT Network is fundamentally decentralized. Decentralization is key to PKT’s mission of helping get the next billion people onto an internet that can never be turned off.
The next question people often ask is what can the PKT Network be used for? This question gets to the heart of what PKT is here to do: decentralize access to the internet. The core idea is that internet access should be available to everyone, since information is fundamental to humanity. If there is excess internet capacity, even if that is low-speed, people should have free access and just pay for how fast they want their internet connection to be when they use it. Governments should not be able to censor access on a whim and ISPs should not be able to arbitrarily throttle speeds if a customer is willing to pay for a fast connection.
PKT is leveraging five key technologies that will introduce a new era of internet connectivity: PKT VPN, PKT Lighting Network (PLD), WiFi Sharing, TokenStrike and cjdns. Each technology plays a key role in making it easier to get online and have access to the quality of service you can afford.
The big question everyone is asking is when will this technology be available for public use? Throughout this report you will find detailed answers about each technology’s roadmap and timelines. Each of the aforementioned five key technologies are in very active development, or in testing, with dedicated developer teams that have never wavered in their focus or determination.
I’d also like to acknowledge all the Pkteers in this community for their commitment and fortitude in this mission to get the next billion people online. The updates below are in no particular order, but each project and milestone collectively push the project towards its goal of decentralizing internet access. The vision of decentralizing and expanding internet access requires community involvement and each person that builds technology on the roadmap, holds PKT, or engages with the project on social media is playing a key part in making this reality possible.
PKT’s 10th decimation will occur on block 1,440,000, estimated to be May 7, 2022. . Decimations are anti-inflationary and occur every 100 days by blockchain rule, with a similar economic function to Bitcoin’s 4-year halving. This 10th decimation is the second of four decimations that will occur in 2022, collectively reducing block rewards by 35% this calendar year. As always, the decimation will reduce the 1 minute block reward by 10%. The 10th decimation will reduce block rewards from 1,613.997 PKT/minute to 1,454.5973 PKT/minute
Cjdns is an open source technology that enables people to get online without an internet connection from a traditional ISP. Cjdns also offers a new core routing protocol called Compact Source Routing. This is the technology that will move real-world data across the PKT Network.
Caleb released this novel technology in 2011 as a way to expand decentralized networking, but the incentive to scale the network wasn’t there early on. Additionally, the technology to process the small denomination microtransactions, which is required for a decentralized bandwidth market, didn’t exist yet.
In 2015, Lightning Network was first introduced in a whitepaper. Lightning Network proposed to solve Bitcoin’s low throughput and slow transactions speeds. Caleb realized that Lightning Network, combined with a bandwidth incentivized blockchain, would finally make it possible to scale decentralized internet access. We will cover PKT Lightning Network in the next section.
PKT is a continuation of the cjdns project. Amongst many things, PKT provides both the economic incentive for: a) high-speed, community operated infrastructure; and b) a layer-1 blockchain that is designed for microtransactions. Naturally, the evolution of cjdns is fundamental to the PKT roadmap.
The key design features and innovations in cjdns ensure robust data throughput, end-to-end encryption and efficiency. Additionally, cjdns underpins the P2P mesh networking capabilities of the PKT Network. This makes the Cloud ISP and Edge Point technology described in the PKT Network whitepaper possible.
More broadly, cjdns enables people to safely and privately share their internet connection from their home or business. When doing so, users are not exposing their internet connection to legal risk. Using this technology, people can get onto the internet through a neighbor, and that connection is routed through PKT VPN for end-to-end encryption. We will cover WiFi-Sharing later in this report.
From a development standpoint, the current focus is to get major parts of the cjdns project code rewritten in Rust. This doesn’t mean all of the cjdns code needs to be rewritten in Rust, but refers to the controlling cjdns code that interoperates with the computer operating system. This includes all the code that handles receiving a packet from the network, or receives a packet from the tun device.
Cjdns’ timer capabilities also need to be rewritten in Rust. This is the part which lets other code inside of cjdns request to be called back in a certain amount of time, or periodically. All these parts of cjdns are known as: the event loop. The goal is to get this all moved from C code, using the libuv library, into Rust, using the tokio library.
The other thing the team is working on is moving the memory allocator. The memory allocator turns out to be a very difficult effort because it is a hierarchical allocator. In software, the general memory allocation process is: a) you need to ask the computer to store something in memory, and b) when done with that memory, you give the memory back. In cjdns, it uses a memory allocator. So when you are done using the memory, you free the allocator, and all that memory is automatically freed. Allocators can also create child allocators, but when you release the memory, all of that memory is freed. In cjdns you can request the allocator to be called back at the time when the allocator is freed, so you can disconnect some stuff, and shut down resources properly before the memory is freed. Porting the memory allocator into Rust is currently in process and making steady progress.
PKT Lightning Network, known as PKT Lightning Daemon (PLD) integration, is a vital milestone for the PKT project. This technology enables near-instant microtransaction settlement and near-infinite transactions per second throughput. These capabilities will make PKT among the fastest and most high-throughput blockchains in the world; alongside other Lightning Network enabled blockchains. PLD is fundamental to realizing core PKT technologies, including WiFi-Sharing, TokenStrike and decentralized bandwidth trading markets.
Community company Anode has been continuously investing into developing and stabilizing PLD. Simultaneously, PLD is being implemented into PKT VPN as well as the Anode PKT Wallets on Android and iPhone.
PLD still has a few issues that are being worked out. One major issue is the code is trying to backup the channels and there is a decrypt error when decrypting the backed-up channels. That is not relevant for the current use cases of Lightning Network, but will be important once Lightning Network is fully activated.
Once PLD development is stable, the next phase will be to integrate Lightning Payment Channels into the PKT mining pools.
The AnodeVPN version 1 app development is 90%+ complete for Android. The VPN app was initially developed on Android because of the more user-friendly developer environment.
The team is reworking the Android workflow so when you enter the app, it invites you to create a wallet first. This is how the Anode iOS app works. The current effort is for both the Android and iOS apps to be a PKT wallet first and also have VPN functionality. This is opposed to a VPN app that has the ability to create a PKT wallet.
AnodeVPN will have core functionality upon initial release, including on/off VPN and PKT wallet. Subsequent releases will include features such as geographical VPN selection, user ratings, VPN marketplace to shop user rated VPNs and eventually the ability to pay for VPN services and bandwidth speed using PKT Cash and no vendor-lock.
A new front end development team has commenced to reskin the Android app with the iOS wallet interface. Once the AnodeVPN app reskin is completed, the plan is to go from a soft alpha release to a soft beta release and get the app in front of more people for testing.
The AnodeVPN Android app is currently available for testing with the old interface. Anyone with an Android phone is welcome to download the app from the AnodeVPN Github. Please provide any bug reports on projects.pkt.cash or in the Anode VPN public channel on PKT.Chat.
As a general warning, do not store PKT on the AnodeVPN PKT wallet unless you have safely backed up your seed words and password. It is important to remember that your password encrypts the seed, so you need to backup both the seed and password to recover a PKT wallet.
TokenStrike is PKT’s very own token issuance protocol. Similar to other token issuance protocols like Ethereum’s ERC-20 and Solana’s SPL tokens, TokenStrike enables unlimited use cases. However, a key difference with TokenStrike is that each token supply is its own mini-blockchain. This means that as adoption occurs, there will not be scalability issues regarding validation and slow transaction speed like with Ethereum. TokenStrike is a defining project on the PKT roadmap.
The TokenStrike project commenced in Summer 2021 and has made significant progress. It has been on the cusp of milestone delivery, but unfortunately, the TokenStrike project did encounter an unforeseen delay in Q1 2022 due to the Russian-Ukraine conflict. The team leader was located in Russia and had to flee with his family to Dubai. Work has resumed over the past 45 days, which includes hiring a new senior Golang developer. This new hire oversees completion of deliverables and has been onboarding into the existing codebase. In parallel with arranging timelines for remaining deliverables, a command line app is being developed to demo what has been done so far. This app will re-enact the workflow given in TestAllFunctions, except using 2 different instances of TokenStrike, one for the wallet and one for the issuer.
Steps 0-5 are now being evaluated for completion:
Step 0: Data structures and basic protocol
Step 1: Issue and transfer
Step 2: Separation of Issuer from Wallet
Step 3: Lock ID and Transfer ID based on block hash
Step 4: Mempool
Step 5: Lock/Send Pause until complete
For a token issuance project of this magnitude senior review is crucial to ensure security, functionality and workflow. The TokenStrike repo is always available for public viewing.
In April 2022, PKT Pal kicked off development of the roadmap project Cjdns WiFi. This technology will allow users to get online via the PKT Network through the WiFi on a desktop or mobile device. The functionality is similar to using a captive portal, like when getting on the internet at a hotel, coffeeshop, airport or airplane. However, the key difference is PKT internet access passes through PKT VPN. This protects the bandwidth provider from legal or privacy risks.
The current development workflow is to first get the infrastructure working. This includes building up-to-date cjdns inside OpenWrt and demo announcing WiFi Direct service with OpenWrt. From here, a flavor of WiFi Direct API will be created and integrated, so the app will have Windows / MacOS / iOS / Linux / Android client support. Access will auto-connect cjdns to the client over WiFi, ideally using the WiFi encryption (WPA Enterprise) in place of cjdns encryption. When the client is nearby to the router with the app running, auto-connect will function similarly to WPA after you’ve entered the password once.
The WiFi-Sharing code will be released open-source to allow for the broadest reach and adoption possible. Subsequent releases of WiFi-Sharing will enable the ability to pay for access, pay for bandwidth speed, and earn money when providing internet access. PKT Lightning Network integration is required for PKT Cash to become a viable payment solution for internet access.
What is also notable about WiFi-Sharing is that development is not contingent on other dependencies. This is great because it means that a version 1 release of WiFi-Sharing can be achieved during 2022 and more thoroughly deployed in 2023.
Wrapped-PKT is the first and currently only utility for PKT. WPKT introduces PKT into the world of EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) and introduces unlimited use cases from DeFi, to NFTs and the ability to use smart contracts. In March 2022, the bridge fees from PKT > WPKT and WPKT > PKT were reduced from 3.5% to 0.75%.
Currently, PKT holders are able to provide liquidity into wPKT liquidity pools and earn an APR! For long term holders, this offers a revenue stream for coins that would otherwise be dormant. There are currently several liquidity pools on wPKT, including BNB/WPKT and USDT/WPKT. Yields fluctuate based on market volatility, with current APR at the time of writing at 36.68% APR for BNB/WPKT and 21.56% for USDT/WPKT.
The technology behind the wPKT bridge is notable for its security features. The Odapp team has done a great job protecting the treasury through its innovative pairing process. The team has also been providing troubleshooting to people who need help using the bridge.
To date, no one yet has launched anything that leverages wPKT’s utility potential in the PKT ecosystem. However, there is a roulette game being developed for wPKT. This game will be released in the coming period. There are also several NFT projects being developed for wPKT on BSC, as well as a new initiative to create a DAO using wPKT. More on the PKT DAO later in this report.
Odapp has developed multi-bridging for wPKT to both Polygon and Ethereum. The Polygon bridge and pool for WPKT is not turned on yet, but currently exists on Polygon QuickSwap DEX. Similarly, the Ethereum bridge has been built, but is not yet live. These bridges will provide PKT a unique ability to cross chain swap, as well as bring liquidity to wPKT from other ecosystems.
There are countless other potential use cases for wPKT, ranging from DeFi, such as collateralized wPKT loans, to utility-based NFT projects and play-to-earn games. As the PKT ecosystem expands, use cases for wPKT should proliferate as well.
The team behind wPKT and PKT Pal are developing a PKT DAO. This development update will introduce the structure and opportunity, even though PKT DAO is still in early development.
The big idea of PKT DAO is to embolden community involvement in the PKT project. This includes empowering people to propose projects for funding, approve projects, and govern the DAO. The PKT DAO will use a Tribute DAO as its framework. This is designed to give the community the flexibility to invest into, support and govern the initiatives that it believes in.
Here is how it works: DAO members must first stake wPKT (yield farm) into a wPKT liquidity pool to receive LP tokens. The first liquidity pools are on PancakeSwap, but Odapp has developed bridges between wPKT, Polygon and Ethereum, which will become available in the future. The LP tokens can then be used to acquire the PKT DAO’s governance tokens. Holding DAO tokens provides membership units to PKT DAO for voting and governance.
DAO voting will be stake-weighted. This is to ensure initiatives have community support and consensus from members. The DAO wants to avoid whales from dominating the voting simply by holding a large position of tokens. For a project to gain approval it will need community support. Technology is also available to streamline community engagement and bring DAO-based voting to platforms such as Discord and Telegram.
One of the first initiatives of PKT DAO is to get a full PKT node into space. Conversations have already begun regarding including PKT technology in a SpaceX Falcon 9 payload over the next 12 months. More details will become available as the PKT DAO is further developed and the community gets involved.
The PKT DAO is expected to launch in Summer 2022.
PKT Pal has developed a Bill Pay technology for PKT. When launched, this creates a true utility, because people will be able to pay their bills using PKT Cash. Users will securely enter the payees for their bills in the PkteerOS dashboard and then use PKT Cash as payment.
Bill Pay is in alpha testing now. This functionality will become available for beta testing with PKT Pal customers first. The product and dashboard will then roll out to the greater community in a phased launch.
PKT Pal is working to help people monetize their internet bandwidth and then pay their bills with their earnings. This use case of paying bills using PKT Cash is a compelling milestone in the PKT project and provides a real world utility for PKT.
The front end development of Anode iOS Mobile Wallet is completed. This wallet also includes PLD integration, which has been in alpha testing for the past 3 months. There are a few bugs that the team is still working to resolve.The biggest issue relates to the PKT iOS wallet in the new versions of iOS (from v14 onward). This introduces a bug in Golang-compiled code that creates memory allocation issues and is causing PLD to crash randomly. This issue first appeared in August 2021 and was fixed in January 2022. However, the new iOS 15.4.1 software does not support the latest Golang version. When the developers upgraded to the latest Golang version and recompiled PLD, that doesn’t seem to have fixed the issue in the newest iOS.
Right now the key objective is to debug any PLD bug that appears in the Android or iPhone app so these wallets can be opened up for beta testing. To solve these final bugs, Anode has commissioned a new developer team to provide finishing support. Anode has also commissioned a team to integrate the VPN technology into the iOS wallet so that AnodeVPN works on both Android and iOS.
The iOS wallet will require Q2 to complete beta testing. However, the AnodeVPN app and wallet is available now for beta testing on Android.
The PKT World wallet continues to be developed. The wallet features a wonderfully-designed desktop interface with built-in mining functionality. This wallet is a turn-key PKT mining app for Windows.
The upcoming release of the PKT World wallet will import existing Electrum wallets or seed phrases. This will make it easier to work with multiple wallet seeds using the Profile Manager feature. The next update is currently in beta testing and is expected to be released in May 2022.
PKT World also is developing a Mac OS and Mobile (Android and eventually iOS) version of the wallet. The PKT World wallet can be downloaded here.
The MatterFi team has remerged with some new development progress. They provided a demo that introduced a new MatterFi PKT Wallet that is able to sync mining wallets. This is a major upgrade from the previous builds that were not able to sync wallets with significant mining history. Now the build is syncing at approximately 10,000-20,000 PKT/hr. The new MatterFi wallet will support BTC, LTC, BCH, and PKT. There is also P2P messaging built in.
The MatterFi team is making a few additional modifications to further improve speed and fix a few UI bugs. However, good news is the MatterFi PKT wallet is planning to make a beta release debut by Summer 2022 on MacOS, Windows and Linux.
A new pull request update was made to PacketCrypt by KuzuDR. The update makes it so anyone has a choice whether they use a config file for PacketCrypt, rather than configuring it with command line flags only. This provides a convenience so people can create a config file as the configuration, instead of having to pass arguments on the command line. KuzuDR also offers a web portal where he will generate the config file for you, so you can run PacketCrypt with the config file.
PKT Pool has launched a new dashboard for the PKT ecosystem. The dashboard offers excellent data visualization and analytics. Features include node graphs, data graphs, wPKT analytics, block mining analysis, address search, and price tracking.
This is both a very good looking website as well as a wonderful tool for community members to track earnings, spot prices, miner stats, block rewards and wallet history.
There are currently 4 PKT stable mining pools: Zetahash, PKT World, PKT Pool and Pkteer.
Pkteer completed its Q1 2022 launch as planned and is now stable ranging between 1-4% of the 24 hour yields. Pkteer is currently offering 90% share to announcement miners, while it attracts community support.
PKT World and PKT Pool continue to provide stable yields ranging between 15-25% each. The pools offer 47.5% and 40% announcement mining shares, respectively.
During Q1 2022 the community saw a solo miner pool emerge and yields up to 20% of the blockchain mining yields. This solo miner kept 100% of the daily yields after the Network Steward percentage. Community members voice concerns about the negative impact the reduced yields had on announcement miner operations. The solo miner shut down its operation in April 2022.
Zetahash has been consistently commanding 30-70% of the blockchain yields, averaging over 50% yields. In April 2022, Zetahash introduced a new tiered announcement mining rewards structure that reduces the share for announcement miners to 10%, except under the following conditions:
a) the mining wallet contains at least 7 days of mining as balance -> 20% share
b) the mining wallet contains at least 14 days of mining as balance -> 30% share
c) the mining wallet contains at least 30 days of mining as balance -> 40% share
Zetahash has posted that the new reward structure is designed to reward miners that hold their PKT mining yields, opposed to selling daily yields, stating: “Due to the nature that mining at cost with rented resources is practically impossible, wallets that show daily movements indicative of selling will unlikely be permitted to continue mining on the Zetahash pool.”
There are also rumblings of several new pools testing their infrastructure for community mining in the coming periods. Of course, the more mining pools, the more distributed the PKT Network becomes, which is overall best for the project.
Edge Points are an important part of the PKT ecosystem. Their purpose is to provide decentralized infrastructure to the PKT Network. In simple terms, Edge Points become the physical home or office access points to the PKT Network. This way people can eventually get online through these access points.
Currently, the PKT Network consists of CPUs running PacketCrypt around the world. These machines are transmitting or receiving data by PKT mining. The next step is for Edge Points in the PKT Network to have WiFi-Sharing capabilities so they can safely and securely share their internet connection in their local area.
WiFi-Sharing is not available yet, but as discussed earlier in this report, it will involve an easy to use application interface that connects to a WiFi antenna. People accessing the internet through WiFi-Sharing will connect through PKT VPN for privacy and legal protection.
The first Edge Points are the PKT Cubes from PKT Pal. Once WiFi-Sharing is enabled, these devices will enable individuals to get online without requiring a traditional ISP. PKT Pal is also developing the new PKT Mini, which is in R&D and moving into production soon. The PKT Mini will retail for less than $600 with a focus on growing the PKT Network at the edge. WiFi-Sharing functionality will also be released on the PKT Cubes, along with an add-on antenna to extend PKT Network connectivity.
The Network Steward recently completed a new funding round, which granted funds to 8 new projects. These projects are (in no particular order):
Each project was selected based on: cost-to-value ratio, probability for completion, and perceived relevance. It was great to see so many submissions and engagement from the PKT community.
There were also several strong projects that were not selected and some late submissions. It is recommended that projects that were not selected consider resubmitting for the next funding round. A common reason to not be accepted, is when a first-time project is too grandiose in size. Consider submitting a parsed-down version of the project so the Network Steward can fund in phases, opposed to one, big initiative.
The Network Steward also is still providing funding to the User-operated Internet Fund (UOIF) operated by NL Net Foundation. The UOIF projects are incredibly impressive and it is recommended to dive into each project for further understanding of the technology being built. Here are the 11 projects being funded by the Network Steward:
The quality of these technology projects is incredible. It is inspiring to see this kind of development coming from the Network Steward’s volunteer work. It is also exciting to imagine the potential these technologies have both for the PKT ecosystem and for the internet itself.
The PKT Cash website continues to be a work in progress and is getting better every month. The PKT Pal team has been making continuous maintenance updates, keeping the text current, adding additional informational pages, and continuously improving the UI.
The newest version of the website launched in March 2022, adding a new menu bar and many new pages, including: Utility, Technology, Ecosystem, GetPKT, and WPKT.
It has been a pleasure to share this in-depth update on the PKT project. Thank you for all the support and dedication from the Pkteer community. Since the PKT project is decentralized, it can sometimes be cumbersome to capture all the development updates in one report. Additionally, not all technology development takes place in the same central repositories, so hopefully this report provides a good guide.
Several community members are now working together to increase the consistency of these updates to keep everyone up to speed on what is behind built. Looking forward to keeping everyone posted on further developments.
Let’s keep building.
Jesse Berger
Community Member
Share this article with your friends
Blockchain & Internet Decentralization
Pkteers! On November 8th, 2023, the PKT Community held its bi-monthly Discord roundtable discussion during which Pkteers shared the latest news and updates about the PKT project. Read along to…
Updates
The PKT Town Hall Newsletter – Issue #4 PKT is an open-source project. All of the PKT blockchain code and the various projects being developed in the ecosystem are managed…