Nervos Community Gears Up for First CKB Halving

[PRESS RELEASE – Tulum, Mexico, November 17th, 2023]

CKB, the blockchain of the Nervos Network, is set to mark a significant milestone with its first halving on November 19th. This event will cut CKB’s hard-capped base issuance rate in half, bringing real inflation down from 7.92% to 3.77%, among the lowest across major Layer 1 blockchains.

In nominal terms, the base issuance will drop from 4.2 billion to 2.1 billion CKB per year, whereas the secondary issuance, which is uncapped and follows a fixed emissions schedule, will remain unchanged, 1.344 billion CKB annually.

The uncapped secondary issuance prevents excessive state growth and ensures a predictable, long-term source of income for CKB miners that is independent of transaction volume. Notably, the inflation from the secondary emissions is narrowly targeted and affects only state occupiers, meaning CKB acts as a disinflationary token for its long-term holders.

The Common Knowledge Base

The network’s powerful Layer 1, known as the Common Knowledge Base (CKB), employs Proof-of-Work for consensus, a groundbreaking generalized UTXO model, and a RISC-V instruction set-based virtual machine for transactions and smart contract execution.

CKB’s unprecedented flexibility allows it to support all kinds of diverse scaling and application solutions built atop it, while security via Proof-of-Work ensures that the network’s global digital infrastructure remains resilient, neutral and permissionless.

Beyond Account Abstraction

CKB sets a new industry standard for flexibility in regard to account abstraction. Its novel accounting model, dubbed the Cell model, is a generalization of Bitcoin’s UTXO model and gives developers complete control over the structure of data stored on-chain, as well as transaction authorization logic, making CKB “accounts” abstract by definition.

Moreover, CKB leverages an utterly abstract, low-level virtual machine, dubbed CKB-VM, which allows developers to deploy various signature and hashing algorithms as if they’re mere plug-ins, without the need for hard forks. Unlike other platforms, where cryptographic primitives are hard-coded via the protocol, this protocol-level abstraction allows transaction signing using the signatures from any blockchain system (or even more widely supported standards, such as Passkeys or DKIM), genuinely redefining what a blockchain can do.

Products such as JoyID, a convenient WebAuthn wallet, and d.id, a chain-agnostic decentralized identity provider, are already using CKB to offer transformational blockchain experiences to thousands of users.

Solving the Challenge of State Bloat

The design of the Nervos Network addresses the issue of state bloat head-on. It adopts a multi-layered architecture and ties state growth to the network’s native token, one CKB equals the right to store one byte of data on-chain.

This architecture reduces on-chain storage requirements by pushing computation off-chain, while restricting the blockchain’s state growth via issuance of CKB minimizes node hardware requirements, ensuring network decentralization.

Moreover, state rent is implemented through narrowly targeted inflation, incentivizing responsible state management on-chain and providing a sustainable, predictable long-term source of income for miners.

First Halving

As CKB approaches its first halving event, it stands as a beacon of innovation and long-term sustainability in a too-often myopic blockchain industry.

Marking this pivotal moment in the network’s journey calls for celebration. The Nervos Foundation is organizing an online party, tune in on YouTube, November 19th @ 10am EST!