Nimiq in one paragraph
Nimiq is a blockchain built for one job: moving money between people without an intermediary in the middle. It has its own network, its own coin (NIM) and its own consensus protocol, which makes it a layer 1 rather than a token issued on someone else's chain. The project calls itself a non profit and open source project, supported by the Nimiq Foundation, and its code is public. Mainnet started on 14 April 2018 under proof of work, and the network moved to proof of stake on 19 November 2024.
Why running in a browser matters
On most chains, joining the network means installing software or trusting a company's API to answer questions on your behalf. Nimiq's client is compiled to WebAssembly and runs as a light node inside a browser tab. It connects to other peers directly, syncs enough of the chain to verify the current tip for itself, and can broadcast transactions without a server in between.
Three things follow from that, and they are the reason the design exists:
- Onboarding is a web page, not an install. You open the wallet in a browser and create an account in a few clicks. No download, no email address, no identity check.
- The app does not have to be trusted with your keys. Signing happens in your own browser, and self custodial is the default rather than an advanced option.
- Verification is local. A light node checks the chain tip itself instead of believing whatever an API tells it.
Two honest caveats. A light client stores block headers rather than the whole history, so deep historical lookups still come from an indexing service or an archive node. And plenty of Nimiq apps, this site included, do use an API for convenience. The point of the browser client is that they are not forced to.
How the network agrees: Albatross proof of stake
Albatross is Nimiq's proof of stake consensus. Instead of miners competing on hardware, validators lock NIM as a deposit and take turns producing blocks. Stake decides how much of the work a validator gets, and the protocol punishes the ones that misbehave.
Micro blocks and macro blocks
Ordinary transactions land in micro blocks, produced by a single selected validator about one second apart. After a fixed run of micro blocks, a macro block closes the batch. That macro block is not produced by one validator alone: it is proposed, then voted through in a two step process that needs the agreement of more than two thirds of the validator slots. There are 512 such slots, shared out among the validators in proportion to their stake.
Epochs and the validator set
A run of batches makes an epoch. The validator set stays the same for the whole of an epoch, and the election macro block that ends one chooses the set for the next. So being registered as a validator, being active, and actually being elected to produce blocks are three different states, which matters a lot when you are choosing where to stake.
What finality means here
Once a macro block has been agreed, the transactions in its batch are final. There is no waiting for a rule of thumb number of confirmations to make a reversal unlikely, because the vote itself is what settles it. Validators that go missing lose the reward for the slot they failed to fill, and validators caught equivocating, for example signing two blocks at the same height, are jailed for eight epochs with their rewards burned.
NIM, the coin
NIM is what the network runs on. It pays transaction fees, which the sender sets and validators collect as part of their batch reward, and it is what you stake. The smallest unit is called the Luna: one NIM is 100,000 Luna, which is why raw amounts in the explorer and in API responses look five decimal places too large until you know that.
The network is designed for a maximum supply of 21 billion NIM, reached gradually rather than all at once, and the move to proof of stake changed who receives newly issued coins: validators and the stakers delegating to them, instead of miners. We do not publish price figures anywhere on this site, and nothing here is financial advice.
What you can actually do with it today
- Hold and send NIM. A browser wallet on a desktop, or the Nimiq Pay app on a phone. Both are self custodial.
- Stake it. Staking is on chain delegation to a validator, and your NIM stays in your own wallet while it is staked. You can compare the validators, their fees and their stake on our validators page.
- Use mini apps. Nimiq Pay hosts small third party apps that can request payments and talk to the wallet through a published SDK.
- Read the chain. Every transaction is public. Our block explorer shows blocks and transactions directly, and NimMap draws the flow of value around an address as a graph.
What Nimiq is not
Three misunderstandings show up often enough in search results that they are worth naming.
- It is not proof of work, and Albatross is not a hybrid. Several widely shared articles describe Nimiq as combining proof of work with proof of stake. It does not. The proof of work chain ended in November 2024.
- It is not a general smart contract platform. Nimiq's account model is deliberately narrow: ordinary accounts plus a few contract types, namely hashed time locked contracts, vesting contracts and the staking contract. There is no on chain virtual machine for arbitrary programs, which is a design choice in favour of a small, auditable protocol.
- Staking is not an exchange product. You do not send NIM to a platform to earn on it. Delegation happens on chain from your own wallet, which is also why articles telling you to stake NIM on a centralised exchange are describing something else.
How to check any of this yourself
You do not have to take our word for it, and you should not have to. Open the explorer and watch the block height move, roughly one micro block per second. Look at the validator list to see who is producing blocks and what they charge. Put any address into NimMap and follow its transactions outward hop by hop. We run a validator on this network, which is the reason this hub exists: the chain data we write from is the data our own nodes see.
If you are new to all of this, the rest of the Learn hub picks up from here.