What changed on Nockchain since July, and what comes next

Welcome to the first Nocktane Dispatch. It covers the 82 days since July 20, when the company that built Nockchain said it was winding down. Each section below gives you the short version and links to a full piece with its sources.

Zorp winds down, NCC steps in

Zorp announced on July 20 that it could not sustain itself in perpetuity and is winding down.¹ In June it had already transferred Nockchain’s trademark, domains and GitHub repositories to Nock Community Co., or NCC.² NCC is a non-stock corporation with “no equity holders and no product”, and it is the beneficiary of the 20% protocol fund.²

In its July 22 post, NCC listed “the governance framework, the fifth director” among items due “Over the coming weeks”.² It also said it intends “to name a fifth director in the coming months.”² Eighty days later, Nocktane found neither. Both stay on our watch list. Read the Governance report.

The AI lane is live, and demand is the next question

Logos, roadmapped for June,³ went live at block 126,000 on August 14.⁷ Getting there took two earlier target heights, 114,300 and 122,000, and a fix for a fork exploit that had blocked activation.⁴⁵⁶⁷ This means miners can now win blocks with a matrix-multiplication puzzle that Pearl miners also run.⁸

On September 4 the team wrote: “Capacity is no longer the constraint. Demand is: turning it into inference someone paid for.”⁹ For Q4 2026, the roadmap lists a routing protocol meant to bring compute demand into the network.¹⁰

The Lockstep paper came out on September 10. It makes transformer inference bit-exact across devices.¹¹ In Nocktane’s reading, routing paid requests to providers falls outside the paper’s scope. Read the Protocol analysis.

Five forks, most on hours of notice

On July 25 the @nockchain account promised that every consensus-critical upgrade would get “an activation height announced with real notice.”⁵ Five forks have activated since. Two were emergency fixes for mining exploits, with 5.3 and 2.7 hours of notice.¹²¹³¹⁷ The three planned upgrades got more: 77.1 hours for Logos, 10.7 hours for Anthropos and 14.8 hours for the 154,500 reset.^141516717 The next upgrade has room to match the 77.1 hours Logos got.

Thirty-seven of the 58 commits to the default branch from July 20 to September 30 went in without a pull request.¹⁸ Read the Mining data.

Two thirds of mined NOCK sits in the bridge

At 12:06 UTC on October 10, the bridge lock held 1.583 billion of the 2.350 billion NOCK mined so far, or 67.4%.¹⁹²⁰ The notes for the September 26 upgrade at block 154,500 say withdrawal processing back to Nockchain stays disabled.¹⁶ In January the roadmap listed withdrawals for Q1 2026, and now it lists Q1 2027.²¹¹⁰ Read the Bridge data.

The block reward drops in about two weeks

If you mine, mark block 170,501. That is where the block reward falls from 2,048 to 1,536 NOCK.²² At the 24-hour average block time, it lands around October 23.²³ After the cut, each block brings miners 1,228.8 NOCK of new issuance and the protocol fund 307.2.²² See the numbers, with a live countdown.

Pearl moved ahead, and the two chains share mining hardware

At 12:05 UTC on October 10, Pearl’s market cap was 7.3 times Nockchain’s, after the two sat near parity on September 13.²⁴²⁵²⁶

The two chains share mining hardware through merge-mining.²⁷ Of the 7,043 Nockchain AI blocks among the latest 10,000 blocks, 7,042 carry a Pearl merge-mining commitment.²⁷ Over the past week, 54.9% of Pearl blocks carried Nockchain’s tag (Nockscan, 12:47 UTC).²⁷

The Flop Network is another chain that pays miners for AI inference work.²⁹ Flop Labs, the project Arthur Hayes leads, lists a Q1 2027 mainnet for it.²⁸²⁹ Read the Sector analysis.

New here?

Start with the field guide. It explains the chain as it stands in October, with a table of where to check each piece. The Network page has the live numbers. The Tracker records every roadmap date and fork notice, with sources.

We publish a Dispatch every week. Every figure carries a source and a UTC timestamp, and when we get something wrong, we correct it openly, with a date.