New Kind of Network (NKN) has announced its release of TestNet Meerkat. As the final TestNet release, the platform was updated to v0.7 two weeks ahead of schedule.

Meerkat claims to be a “a full featured testnet with complete implementation, strong security and enhanced performance, plus SDK release.” And that it represents a “significant milestone” in the platform’s technology development as it works towards a MainNet release.

The release can be accessed here on Github.

Included in the announcement was a list of improvements, changes, and upgrades from its previous iteration. The majority of the development efforts appear to be focused on improving the network’s network layer, consensus module, and block synchronization.

NKN also claims to have improved the security of its platform, by making it “resistant to various attacks, including sybil attack, timestamp attack, collusion attack, multi-proposal attack.”

On the network layer, the team bolstered its resistance against malicious and spam messages. The network layer also received an improvement that claims to be responsible for “70x more efficient block/transaction broadcasting,” as well as a “100% faster relay message” through the use of latency-based proximity routing.

Its block synchronization module was also rewritten and is claimed to be 10x faster.

Besides the improvements made to the platform’s security, speed, and efficiency, NKN also implemented a new feature to increase the awareness of applications running on the platform.

A new function named Pub/Sub was introduced that allows users to subscribe to topics through the wallet SDK and receive notifications sent to these topics through the client SDK. This feature will reportedly allow people to discover useful application services that run on top of the NKN platform.

A number of new SDKs were released to coincide with the launch of Meerkat. These development kits are available for both client and wallet versions in Golang, Javascript, and Java.

Specifically built for miners and ecosystem partners, NKN’s community also released nknX, which is a blockchain explorer, mining node manager, and wallet tracker.

Reflecting the “substantial” amount of work the team has put into the development for Meerkat, the project’s Github received 12,451 new lines of code, 128 file changes, and 7,208 lines of code replacements.

Moving forward, NKN’s next challenge will be the release of its MainNet Beta named Beluga v0.9. The Beta is scheduled for release in March this year and intends to further improve the platform’s “scalability and performance as well as attack resistance.”

A tentative intermediate MainNet preview (release v.08) is also planned for release before March.

Tags: ,