Navio Mainnet Is Live: Private Proof-of-Stake Is Finally Here

Back in January, I wrote a retrospective on my NavCoin staking journey and said I was eagerly anticipating the launch of Navio. Well, the wait is over. The Navio mainnet is live, and it has been running since the start of July.

I've been staking NAV since 2018, and over the last few years I've also been contributing to navio-core itself, with more than 500 commits to the codebase. So this launch is personal. Let's walk through what actually shipped.

The Launch

Navio Core v0.1.0 was published on June 28, 2026, as the first stable release of Navio Core and the launch of the Navio mainnet. The genesis block carries a timestamp of July 1, 2026, 13:00 UTC.

Under the hood, Navio Core is built on the Bitcoin Core codebase, with BLSCT (Boneh-Lynn-Shacham Confidential Transactions) added at the base layer. Binaries were released for Linux (x86_64, ARM, RISC-V and PowerPC), macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon) and Windows, with signed SHA256SUMS so you can verify your download before running it.

What Makes Navio Different

In that retrospective I explained that NavCoin only offered private transactions through its xNAV token. Navio flips that around: privacy is the default, not an add-on.

Confidential Transactions Everywhere

Every shielded output hides both the amount and the parties involved, using Pedersen commitments and BLS12-381 range proofs. The chain stays publicly verifiable (anyone can check that no coins were created out of thin air) without anyone learning who sent what to whom. Addresses are bech32m stealth addresses that start with nav1.

Proof-of-Private-Stake (PoPS)

This is the part I've been most excited about. On a normal Proof-of-Stake chain, everyone can see which address produced a block and how much it had staked. With PoPS, a staker proves two things with zero-knowledge proofs:

1. A set-membership proof showing it controls one of the staked commitments, without revealing which one.
2. A range proof showing the hidden amount in that commitment is enough to win this particular block.

The result is that the validator's identity, the amount staked, and even the link between two blocks produced by the same staker never appear on-chain. You help secure the network without putting a target on your wallet.

Mainnet Parameters

According to the Navio consensus documentation, the key mainnet numbers are:

Parameter	Mainnet value
Target block time	120 seconds
Block reward	8 NAV
Minimum stake	10,000 NAV
Consensus	Short PoW bootstrap, then PoPS
P2P / RPC ports	48470 / 48471
Address format	bech32m, nav1...

Moving Your Old NAV to Navio

If you're still holding legacy NavCoin, the migration goes through the official bridge at bridge.nav.io. It's a two-step process:

1. NAV to wNAV: Connect a BNB Smart Chain wallet on the bridge, register once, and send your legacy NAV to the deposit address the bridge gives you. The equivalent amount of wrapped NAV (wNAV) is minted to your BSC wallet, usually within a few minutes.
2. wNAV to native NAV: On the bridge's Withdraw page, enter a Navio address (starting with nav1). The bridge burns your wNAV and sends native NAV to that address on the new chain.

Be careful here. The bridge only accepts mainnet nav1... addresses. Old NavCoin (N...) addresses and testnet (tnv1...) addresses are rejected, and the official guide warns that burning with a wrongly formatted address destroys the wNAV with no refund. Send a small test amount first, and follow the official coin swap guide step by step rather than a summary like this one.

Staking on Navio

Staking works a little differently from the old navcoind setup I described back in 2018. Instead of the wallet staking on its own, you lock coins into a stake and run a separate staker process.

First, download Navio Core from the releases page, start naviod, and let it sync. Then create a wallet (BLSCT is the default wallet type) and grab a nav1 address to receive your coins:

navio-cli createwallet "staking"
navio-cli -rpcwallet=staking getnewaddress "Staking" "blsct"

Once your NAV has arrived, lock at least the 10,000 NAV minimum into a stake:

navio-cli -rpcwallet=staking stakelock 10000

Finally, run the staker against your wallet. It connects to your node over RPC, builds the Proof-of-Private-Stake proofs, and submits blocks when you win:

navio-staker -wallet=staking

When you want your coins back, stakeunlock releases them from the stake into your regular spendable balance.

Cold Staking

If you'd rather not keep your spending keys on an always-online server, Navio Core v0.1.7 added delegated cold staking. You hand an operator the ability to produce blocks with your stake, while only your offline key can spend or unstake the coins, and you can revoke the delegation at any time with stakeunlock. The details are in the cold staking documentation.

Life After Launch

A mainnet launch is the start of the work, not the end. The releases have kept coming at a fast pace, up to v0.2.1 at the time of writing. The biggest one so far is v0.2.0, which:

• Moved the BLSCT cryptography from the herumi/mcl library to supranational/blst, while staying byte-compatible with the existing chain.
• Brought in a hardened "v2" proof transcript that activates at mainnet height 42,500, so every node needs to be on v0.2.0 or later.
• Introduced an encrypted peer-to-peer messaging layer, with aggregated sends that hide which outputs belong to the sender, and atomic swaps between tokens and NAV.
• Fixed a block production stall that hit mainnet on September 5, 2026.

That last point is worth being honest about: a brand-new chain running brand-new cryptography will have rough edges, and it did. What matters to me is that it was diagnosed and fixed in the open within days. If you run a node, keep it up to date.

Final Thoughts

When I first set up a NavCoin staking box on an Ubuntu 16.04 server in 2018, a fully private Proof-of-Stake chain felt like a far-off research idea. Now it's running, and I get to help build it.

If you want to dig deeper, start with the Navio documentation and the navio-core repository. And if you're still sitting on legacy NAV, now is a good time to make the move.