Hey folks! This week we’re discussing the end of airdrops, the rise of Chainless Apps, and the beginning of unpermissioned mining competition in the second week of Nockchain’s life, among other things.
The End of the Airdrop Era
The industry is starting to realize that airdrops are a dead-end.
As Viktor Bunin recently said, "In 2025 no one should be doing an airdrop." They’re sybil-attacked to death and bad for retention; genuine supporters get dumped on; and they’re a nightmare for teams to manage.
We agree, which is why we expect to see more creative fair-launch strategies like ours.
Proof of Work is its own distribution engine.
The Rise of Chainless Apps
There’s been a wave of discussion around "chainless apps," following Brian Seong's recent paper on the concept.
While Seong and Gebheim describe chainless apps as "a new paradigm" that decouples execution from trust and settlement, we're happy to note that "chainless apps" have been the vision behind Nockchain from the beginning.
Nockchain incentivizes prover capacity with zkPoW, and provides trustless settlement to a global namespace of verifiable compute conditions. The Nockapp framework enables off-chain apps with integrated verifiable computation—in fact, Nockchain itself is written as a Nockapp. With the Nock zkVM, any Nock computation can generate a proof, creating verifiable off-chain apps integrated directly with on-chain settlement.
This is why we call Nockchain the lightweight blockchain for heavyweight verifiable compute.
Nockchain Technical Updates
A few key updates from the second week of Nockchain…
First Competitors Enter the Race
The most exciting development this week is that several blocks have now been mined, permissionlessly, by external parties independently optimizing the open-source client.
On May 31, we saw the first block mined by an unrecognized address, quickly followed by a second. As of today, 31 blocks have been mined by external parties across two wallets.
Armitage claimed at least one of those blocks, with a triumphant "WE GOT ONE."
To anyone who doubted the fairness of our launch, the proof is now on-chain. Evidently, the open-source client we released in advance of launch must not have been too far from competitive (as some people feared), even if some performance optimizations were required (as we indicated they would be).
We’re also now aware of at least one new company that’s forming to mine $NOCK.
So it's official, the race is on.
Live Network Dashboard
We've deployed a live status dashboard providing some initial network metrics. It’s currently showing block height, blocks until next difficulty adjustment, current difficulty target, etc. More advanced analytics and monitoring tools are in the pipeline as we continue building out infrastructure for miners, developers, and users.
Improved Sync Performance
We pushed our most significant upgrade yet, addressing synchronization issues for nodes catching up to chain tip. The upgrade resolves an emergent behavior where nodes would become overwhelmed by cascading "elders" requests when trying to sync. By tracking the highest block height seen (distinct from the heaviest block), nodes which hear gossipped blocks far ahead of their own tip can now continue to request blocks sequentially rather than triggering avalanches of ancestry requests. This enables rapid catch-up without overwhelming network capacity. Back up your snapshot before upgrading by stopping your node and then copying .data.nockchain to .data.nockchain.state-0. While we've thoroughly tested this upgrade, state changes always carry some risk.
Nockchain’s First Difficulty Adjustment
The Nockchain network saw its first difficulty adjustment this week. Mining a block became approximately 13% more difficult as the epoch completed ~1.5 days early. In Proof of Work systems, difficulty adjustments are critical for maintaining consistent block times and network security. Lower target numbers mean higher difficulty.
