Douwe van de Ruit, KPN Blockchain Business Lead, announced at the NEO meetup held in Amsterdam that the Dutch telecommunications service provider is planning to host a NEO full consensus node.
In early December, the Coz Council released an article that described the vision of the decentralized distribution of nodes, to be achieved through “coopetition.” Coopetition creates a cooperative consortium of entities that would otherwise be competitors, by creating an opportunity for each company to develop on the NEO platform, while mutually increasing their particular market reach.
In late December of 2017, the NEO council announced the launch of new consensus nodes on the TestNet, in preparation of their launch on the MainNet. To run a consensus node, all nominees will undergo a thorough identification process before being voted onto the MainNet. Holders of the nodes must be able to provide proper identification to ensure they’re operating within legal liability of their respective governments.
Once seven initial nodes are up and running on MainNet, the NEO voting process will begin, which will allow more nodes to join the network to increase the failure tolerance of the network. The CoZ Council said the nodes will be ran by entities of different nationalities and countries, under different operating systems, so that no single jurisdiction can affect the failure of the network.
Who is KPN?
KPN is a Dutch landline and mobile telecommunications company, that was founded in 1989 and is the 38th largest telephone operating company in the world (by total revenue). KPN has 6.3 million fixed-line telephone customers; more than 33 millions mobile subscribers in the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, France, and Spain; and, provides internet access to 2.1 million customers throughout Western Europe.
Additionally, KPN operates on the Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX), the second largest internet exchange globally. A internet exchange is the physical infrastructure that internet service providers exchange internet traffic between networks.
Other KPN stakeholders include Stichting Preferente Aandelen, America Movil, Norges Bank, BlackRock, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, and JP Morgan Chase & Co.
In conjunction with a CoZ node update made December of 2017, KPN is now the fifth node to have been launched on TestNet. Other nodes include a node in the Swiss datacenter Deltalis, and three CoZ council member nodes individually located in California (US), Michigan (US), and Sydney (AUS).
NEO now has three council member nodes, two private enterprise nodes, and will be ready for MainNet launch once two more nodes have been identified and vetted.
by Dylan Grabowski
About The Author: Dylan Grabowski
Dylan is a reformed urban planner with a passion for covering the Neo ecosystem. His objective as a writer for Neo News Today is to report news in an objective, fact-based, non-sensational manner. When not behind a computer screen, he can be found in the mountains rock climbing. Find Dylan on Twitter (@GrabowskiDylan).
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