Nockchain Tokenomics and Use Cases
Listen to Neal Davis explore Nockchain tokenomics and use cases. He discusses the network's native coin, $NOCK, with details about transaction fees, data storage, and settlement. One interesting detail is that Nockchain's issuance curve starts out steeper than Bitcoin's, with the intention of incentivizing rapid software optimization over the slower development of specialized mining hardware. The system operates on the concept of "proof-power," where heavy computations are performed off-chain, and lightweight, verifiable proofs are posted to the blockchain. Perhaps Nockchain can create a new frontier for privacy-preserving consensus in an increasingly AI-driven world, without relying on centralized platforms.
News
What we're seeing.
- While ZKPs promise proof of truth without revealing private data, this promise can be undermined if proof generation is outsourced to a third-party prover. In such scenarios, sensitive data is exposed in plaintext to the server generating the proof, a common practice driven by desires to save cost, improve user experience (UX), or reduce development complexity.
- ZKsync Gateway is live, serving as a middleware component for cross-chain messaging and proof aggregation across ZKsync Chains. This development is aimed at reducing settlement costs on Ethereum L1 by combining proofs from various ZKsync Chains into a single proof, laying the groundwork for faster interoperability within the Elastic Network.
- ZKP2P announced a new onramp directly to HyperEVM from various payment platforms like Venmo, Wise, Cashapp, Revolut, Zelle, and Mercado Pago. This service allows users to onramp fiat to HYPE, USDT0, and USDe without fees, aiming to simplify access to the Hyperliquid ecosystem.
- Worldcoin opened a new flagship location in London for users to get their private, anonymous verified World ID. This expansion coincides with their push for full World network access in the UK.
- Circle's native USDC stablecoin is now available on World.
Research
What we're reading.
A Review of libZK: Google Wallet ZKP (2025). Many services have to check that a person is older than a certain age, without needing to know anything else. The new Google Wallet system uses libZK, which was built by Frigo and Shelat to meet this need on a phone (where time, battery, and data are scarce). Their key idea is to pair a fast GKR-style inner protocol with a Ligero outer layer, keeping them interactive until the final Fiat–Shamir step so no extra challenge arithmetic bloats the proof. They invent a dual-circuit arithmetization that lets one proof natively handle ECDSA math and bit-wise SHA-256 checks while ensuring both views stay consistent through an in-circuit MAC. The finished proof is small and under-a-second to create, making private age verification practical for everyday wallets. National-scale age-checking with strong privacy is now possible with top-tier UX and no need for blockchains.
Stablecoins and the US Treasury Market (2025). Stablecoins promise quick, cheap digital dollars, yet Yadav and Malone show that their “moneyness” depends on a critical, fragile input: the ability of issuers to trade short-duration Treasury bills whenever users ask to mint or redeem tokens. There is a question around the linking of 24/7 crypto activity with a government-bond market that sleeps on weekends, can seize up under stress, and is already coping with record federal borrowing. Because of the timing and liquidity mismatch, a run on stablecoins could force mass sales of Treasuries just when buyers vanish, while a glitch in the Treasury market could stop issuers from honoring the one-to-one peg.
The authors simulate future growth and find that even conservative adoption paths would make stablecoin issuers some of the largest net buyers of U.S. debt, nudging Treasury toward ever more short-term issuance. Recognizing this two-way interdependence, they urge regulators to treat bond-market plumbing and stablecoin oversight as a single financial-stability problem.
Attitude networks as intergroup realities (2023). How do issue opinions and party identities fit together? Lüders et al. tackle this by turning survey answers on eight “hot-button” U.S. issues into a map of 40 nodes using a new Response-Item Network (ResIN) method. The force-directed map splits cleanly into two clusters, and a person’s location on that map predicts how strongly they call themselves Democrat or Republican, and how warmly they feel toward each side. The same pattern appears in a much larger, nationally representative ANES sample, confirming it is not a fluke of online volunteers. The core insight is that attitudes are both the building blocks of group identity and the cues people use to navigate social life.
Most interestingly, the network graph is asymmetric: "Democrats embrace more extreme viewpoints on the selected issues compared with Republicans, but also that the Republican cluster includes some surprising issue positions... Democrats (more than Republicans) tightly centre their belief-system around a set of positions at the extremes of these particular items, implying that people who deviate from these positions are likely to be considered as outgroup members..."
Nockchain Technical Updates
- For multiple days this week, community miners using custom upgrades of the open-source client were capturing ~50% of blocks! The Proof of Work incentives are successfully decentralizing the network and creating fierce mining competition just a few weeks after launch.
- To help you track the horse race, we've improved our status dashboard with more metrics and a new mining leaderboard, showing the last 24 hours of blocks mined and an all-time view.
- Shout out to community member Marcus Miguel for making a major improvement to our build tool,
hoonc. This update enhances caching, which will speed up build times and significantly improve the developer experience across the board. - As the network has grown, we have increased the connection limits on our Nockchain relay nodes and improved the robustness of our monitoring and deployments. By default, all miners and nodes connect to our relays to sync the chain and discover other peers, making this a critical upgrade for network stability. We posted a short update about it on X.
- We have improved the speed and reliability of syncing Nockchain. Community members are reporting that their nodes are healthy and staying in sync with ease. Wallet syncing has also been sped up.
- Finally, we are making it easier for the community to spin up local "fakenets" to quickly test optimizations to the mining process.
