Migration value
Users in the community
Coinmarketcap
"The Opt-in is an unique chance to participate in the history of Symbol"
DAVE HODGSON NEM Group, CIO
NEM Group, CIO
A $7bn open source blockchain migration
The launch of a new blockchain for an existing community marked a pivotal moment for NEM Group. Our goal was to enable the community to seamlessly transition and engage with the new Symbol blockchain. This case study unveils how we facilitated the migration of over $7bn in assets to Symbol, leveraging open source technology, making it accessible to the entire community and setting a precedent in blockchain evolution
Challenge: Navigating Blockchain's Immutable Nature for Upgrades
One of the main features of Blockchain technology is immutability. This allows building consensus and security among all actors in a network while ensuring that all recorded data will remain indelible and available in the registry indefinitely.
Among all the advantages that this entails, it also implies that making an update directly on the protocol is impossible, since the genesis block (block number 0) defines all the base information of the protocol and therefore all the following blocks are chained to from this.
What is Symbol
NEM Group carried out the development of its new Blockchain known as Symbol, under the development alias Catapult, for more than 4 years. This technology follows and extends the vision of its original NEM NIS1 chain and aims to exponentially increase its scalability, security and native functionalities that allow the development of decentralized applications.
Among them, we highlight aggregated transactions, account restrictions, the inclusion of metadata in accounts, tokens and namespaces, and multilevel multisignature contracts.
The Challenge: Optional Migration
NEM needed to offer all its users a migration process from its NEM NIS1 Blockchain to the new Symbol Blockchain, which is known as a new blockchain due to the impossibility of updating the previous one. This migration involved the migration of balances of approximately $7 Billion in addition to all the information of previous multisignature accounts and previously registered domains (namespaces).
In addition, this process had to be completely open-source and directly integrated into the previous blockchain protocol, so that in a completely transparent and open source scenario it could be mathematically guaranteed that all this information would be transferred from one Blockchain to the next without that can be hacked, without any funds being stolen and without any data being lost during the process in a community of around 1 Million users.
The Opt-in Protocol Solution
The Opt-in Protocol developed by Peersyst is a second-layer application on the NEM blockchain, designed as an NPM module to be integrated into multiple services. It was created to facilitate the seamless migration of assets and data to the Symbol blockchain. This open-source protocol was specifically engineered to be integrated into NEM’s existing infrastructure, including its NIS1 blockchain, mobile applications, the main Desktop Wallet (NanoWallet), and support for the primary hardware wallets (Ledger and Trezor). The protocol’s decentralized nature ensures a secure, transparent, and efficient transition of assets and data to the Symbol blockchain, thereby contributing to the successful migration of $7 billion in assets from NEM NIS1 to Symbol
Benefits
Integration of the module in the Nanowallet
Integration of the module in the Mobile Wallet
Development of Symbol Paper wallet
Integration with the main hardware wallets
What benefits did the customer get?
NGL managed to effectively migrate all its data in a completely public and transparent way in an on-chain protocol without losing a single asset or data during this process, giving all its users access to the new Symbol blockchain with minimal friction and without any type of technological knowledge while preserving their data and giving continuity to their previous Blockchain.
During this process, NGL advanced from the top 30 on Coinmarketcap in capitalization from around $1 BN to the top 14 with around $7 BN achieving the successful and fully decentralized launch of one of the newest, most powerful, scalable and embeddable blockchains on the world
