Some of you might know that I recently wrote about NIX Platform switching from PoW to PoS and guess what, the test net is already up and running, waiting to be, well, tested. This brings NIX closer to achieving yet another goal: private cross chain interoperability.

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Announcement

Lead developer jackieboy announced in Discord that everyone who wishes to test the upcoming features now has the chance to do so:

As I am personally very excited, I decided to do just that. This article is to guide you through accessing the testnet and to showcase the new features as experienced by yours truly.

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Building the new wallet with POS 3.0

Let's go ahead and build the new wallet. Please be careful that you don't replace your main net wallet (please create a backup of your wallet.dat and ghostnode.conf just in case). You can either pull the source files from here or just download this .zip archive (recommended for beginners). Extract the NixCore-pos30 folder if you opted for the latter option and skip the first three steps. Alright, let's get to it! Open a terminal (navigate to the NixCore-pos30 folder if you chose the archive) and type:

git clone https://github.com/NixPlatform/NixCore.git
cd NixCore
git checkout pos30

./autogen.sh
./configure
make CFLAGS=-fPIC

So far so good! We now start the wallet with the -testnet parameter. To do that, we use the following command (assuming we are in the NixCore folder):

./src/qt/nix-qt -testnet

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We are now welcomed by this wallet (the new UI is not yet implemented here):

Note: The NIX shown here are "test NIX". You can get yours by requesting them in the Discord #testnet channel.

We can now try the two new big features: staking and the ghost vault.

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Staking

Staking allows users to earn passive income by, well, staking their coins. To stake your coins, simply open your wallet and encrypt it. The encryption process is finished by a restart of nix-qt. You will now see the option Unlock For Staking in the Settings menu in the top left corner. You will be prompted with the following pop-up. After you entered your wallet password, the green icon in the bottom right corner indicates that you are indeed staking.

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After staking for a longer period of time, you will receive your rewards. They look just like Ghost Node rewards in your wallet and are proportional to your stake:

Image courtesy of jackieboy, testnet wallet.

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Ghost Vault

We hit this tab and are promptly taken over to the GV interface.

Choose the sub-tab Ghost NIX and enter the amount you want to ghost. For this test, I have ghosted 42NIX. This is how ghosting looks on the blockchain explorer. After the tx has been confirmed, the wallet shows as follows:

The ghosted NIX can now be converted back to regular NIX. You can either decide to send them back to your own wallet, or to any other address. I created a new address for this and un-ghosted the 42NIX:

The explorer shows that address 2XAx7P79fJX8EfyopuduJP9n49RvacAdp7 has indeed received the 42NIX. No link between those two addresses can be established. Normally, you would ghost a multiple of 10 NIX and then un-ghost however many NIX you want to send to your recipient.

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Issues and Parting Words

While testing, I have encountered a few minor visual errors as well as reindexing problems. Thanks to the #testnet Discord channel and the fast continuous support, they were promptly resolved. This can be verified by inspecting the commit history for the POS3.0 branch on GitHub.

Summing up, I can say that NIX is a project with innovative ideas as well as actual development. Once the changes are live on the main net, NIX will be the first coin to run POS3.0, a privacy layer and btc core 0.16. This is just the first step towards reaching cross chain interoperability. Instead of competing with other coins, NIX enhances them.

Disclaimer: I was not paid for this article but do hold coins.

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Should any questions arise, please feel free to comment them down below. I will answer them all!