NKN aims to incentivize Internet users to share network connections and use unused bandwidth through financial incentives. NKN aims to be a network for building decentralized applications in a way that enhances point-to-point data transmission and connectivity.

NKN's vision is to build the world's largest blockchain network system.

In a world where most communications are still handled through central servers, it is hard to eliminate the possibility of equipment being compromised, hacked or eavesdropped. Today's Internet is designed for peak traffic, but it wastes bandwidth when the network is mostly underutilized. Many large Internet projects use centralized servers for control in order to quickly aggregate information and maintain continuous accessibility, greatly reducing the security of visitors and the confidentiality of their solutions.

NKN hopes to solve the current challenges of the Internet through decentralized solutions based on blockchain technology and the latest network topology based on cellular automata theory. NKN's goal is to use blockchain to reshape the Internet: improve the efficiency of network resources, and enhance network scalability and security.

NKN is a completely decentralized blockchain system that can support the consensus of ten-million-level nodes based on network transmission work proof. Driven by an economic model and shared by the community, NKN builds a new point-to-point network, which provides developers with an open, convenient, efficient and secure network connection and transmission platform. Applications developed based on NKN will bring a variety of new network experience to end users. The NKN network improves the PoW consensus mechanism of bitcoin mining, changing the mechanism of getting rewards in PoW from the contribution of energy consumption to the contribution of connection and network resources in data transmission. Consensus through Relay Proof (POR) NKN designs a signature chain for verifiable data transmission, which can not only achieve effective proof of work, but also guarantee that the chain is not tamper-proof, cannot be forged, and can resist attacks. The distributed data transport network NKN provides tens of thousands of users and nodes with a Chord DHT-BASED decentralized link and network overlay, allowing data to be transferred efficiently between any client without the need for a centralized server. A highly scalable consensus algorithm, called Major Vote Cellular Automata (MOCA), is designed based on the Cellular operation model of THE CA model, and has been deployed and implemented in NKN's new network with tens of thousands of nodes.

Miners mine NKN tokens by representing network relay traffic. 2. Users pay for data transfer using NKN. 3. Miners earn additional NKN by hosting value-added services on their nodes (e.g. NConnect secure remote access, nCDN for content delivery) 5. Token holders pay subscription and name registration fees to NKN

NKN consists of a number of nodes distributed globally. Each node connects only to its neighbors. Packets can be forwarded from any node to any other node in an efficient and verifiable route. The decentralized Data Transfer Network (DDTN) corresponds to the network layer of the NKN blockchain platform and its function is to transfer any data to any node/client without any central server. As a data transmission network, DDTN can contain millions or more nodes. 2. MVCA consensus algorithm based on cellular automata This consensus algorithm can be highly scalable and can support the network scale of millions or even billions of nodes. In short, MVCA is efficient in terms of consensus time and number of messages, because it takes only a few iterations of communication between neighbors to reach a network-wide consensus. PoR uses a signature chain to sign Relay packets. The principle is that all participants in an active communication channel form a signature chain according to the sequence of time stamps. While ensuring security, PoR will count how much data a node relays. The NKN network distributes NKN token rewards based on participants' contributions. 4. Relay path Validation (RPV) The validity of any relay path should be a consensus among all nodes, as it is a prerequisite for selecting globally unique mining nodes for each block, and RPV selection nodes reach consensus by using already agreed global information. This prevents an attacker from selecting a specific node to control the direction of packets. 5. The NKN addresses of nodes in the NKN address scheme embedded with public keys need to remain random for two reasons. First, it is difficult for malicious nodes to select specific NKN addresses. Once a malicious node can choose an NKN address, it is easier for it to attack the system as a neighbor, because NKN routing is based on NKN address. Secondly, randomness ensures a more balanced load between nodes with a given NKN address, effectively making the network more decentralized.

Competitors: Substratum, Orchid Protocol and Right Mesh. Substratum: uses idle bandwidth resources to transmit data, but still relies on TCP/IP. Compared with Substratum, NKN is less dependent on TCP/IP protocol, so it hopes to establish another set of network protocol for transmission. Orchid Protocol: functions as a decentralized VPN network, free from censorship and monitoring. Users transfer content by allocating idle bandwidth resources to form a point-to-point network. NKN, in contrast to Orchid Protocol, is not aimed at a specific purpose, but aims to streamline network traffic by sharing idle resources. Right Mesh: Connect various devices on mobile devices or IOT devices through wifi and Bluetooth, and then share idle network resources to transfer content. Right Mesh is limited to using the idle network resources of mobile devices, while any device is connected to NKN.

NKN Outlines the three infrastructures needed to implement Web3 -- computing, storage, and networking. Various blockchains like Etherreum are dealing with decentralized computing, while Filecoin, Arweave, Sia, and others are dealing with decentralized storage. NKN aims to facilitate the development of decentralized networks. Data communications is a $1.4 trillion-a-year business. NKN is one of the largest blockchain networks with a full consensus node count, with over 100,000 nodes worldwide. In addition, NKN says 99.9% of nodes are run by community members and supported by mining incentives. The project team had less than 0.1% of the nodes used for testing purposes. On top of NKN's peer-to-peer network infrastructure layer are several applications, such as nMobile (Secure private chat), nConnect (Secure Remote access), and Surge (Private P2P file sharing).