As announced in a recent official blog post, the NIX team decided to switch the network consensus of NIX to proof-of-stake. This brings various #security improvements, stabilizes the past "mining inequalities", allows all users to earn passive income with #staking and more.
New Specifications
According to the official post mentioned above, the new NIX specifications (after the switch to PoS) will be:
Staking
Everyone will be able to stake their NIX coins (unless they are locked in ghost nodes) to earn passive income. This is particularly interesting for users with a balance of fewer than 40000 NIX due to the fact that they are not able to capitalize on ghost node rewards. The ROI for staking is expected to settle at around 6%.
Block Rewards from 64 NIX down to 28.5 NIX
With no more miners on the network, the rewards have been allocated. This can be seen in the above posted specs and drastically reduces newly generated supply. The currently running PoW network features a 42 NIX block reward for miners which is expected to be replaced with a 6 NIX reward for stakers.
Ghost Node Rewards
The reward percentage for ghost nodes (master nodes) will be unaffected and currently features a ROI of 34.14% (taken from the Discord info bot).
Further Development
As mentioned in their Discord channels, the team is now fully focusing on implementing the change of consensus. Thus, the above mentioned numbers are not yet final and still subject to change. There will be an official announcement once the change is rolling out. Users will then have to update their wallets to support the PoS consensus. Testing and evaluation on the testnet are imminent.
Parting Thoughts
It is safe to say that the team is steering the platform in the right direction. These changes were highly anticipated by the Discord community and come without any drawbacks for the network itself. Miners will not be hurt either as they can point their hash power at other networks.
If you have not yet heard about NIX, be sure to inform yourself: https://nixplatform.io/. I am not being paid for this article by the NIX team and appreciate all comments.