Block 170,000 gave miners 84.7 hours of notice, and the reward cut has landed

Welcome to Dispatch No. 002. It covers Oct 10 to Oct 24. The headline is the longest notice Nockchain has given for an upgrade, and a reward cut that is now behind us.

Block 170,000 gave miners 84.7 hours

The developers opened pull request #221 on Oct 19 at 15:20 UTC and named block 170,000 as the activation height.¹ The block arrived on Oct 23 at 04:00 UTC.⁴ That is 84.7 hours of notice, and Logos held the old best at 77.1.⁴²³ Thank you to the developers for sending a deployment list and a written protocol note along with the merge.¹²

Both mining lanes got a new starting point. The ZK reference rate is 100 billion Tip5 hashes a second, and the AI reference rate doubled to 20 EMAC/s.³ The first 501 blocks after the reset took 189.0 seconds each on average, against the 150-second aim.⁴⁵ Blocks have sped up since. Blocks 170,750 to 170,850, mined by 21:38 UTC on Oct 24, averaged 124.5 seconds.¹⁰

If you run a node or a miner, two parts of the package applied on upgrade, ahead of 170,000: updated transaction checks, and a list of fixed block IDs for heights 126,000 to 154,499.¹² Private gRPC access now asks for an operator credential, or an explicit single-user opt-out, and listens on the local machine only.¹ Read the Protocol report.

The reward cut landed on Oct 24

Block 170,501 arrived at 06:18 UTC on Oct 24 and paid 1,536 NOCK, down from the 2,048 of block 170,500.⁵⁶ The miner now receives 1,228.8 NOCK of new issuance per block. The protocol fund receives 307.2 NOCK per block, down from 409.6.⁵⁶ As of 21:38 UTC on Oct 24, the fund had received 43.12 million NOCK in total, sent 12.94 million and held 30.18 million.¹³ Our reward cut guide has the full schedule.

ZK mining spread out

Over the seven days to 21:38 UTC on Oct 24, the top ZK prover won 37.8% of ZK blocks, 497 of 1,315.⁷ On Oct 10 that share was 60.6%. The ZK lane now has 10 provers who won blocks. The AI lane has 8, and its top prover won 54.5% of AI blocks, 1,414 of 2,596.⁷ The AI lane took 66.4% of all blocks, 2,596 of 3,911.⁷ Our method counts each prover by its first payout address and leaves out the protocol fund address.

Nockscan’s ZK reading at block 170,855 (21:41 UTC) was 12.36 million proofs a second. Its AI reading at block 170,856 (21:42 UTC) was 11.11 EMAC/s.⁸⁹ Both lanes restarted at block 170,000, so these numbers do not compare with the ones in Dispatch No. 001.

Pearl is 14.3 times larger, and the chains still share miners

At 21:40 UTC on Oct 24, Pearl’s market cap was $681.8M and Nockchain’s was $47.7M, a ratio of 14.3.¹⁴¹⁵ On Oct 10 it was 7.3. NOCK traded at $0.02016, down 25.6% from the $0.02708 we printed on Oct 10.¹⁴ Data: CoinGecko. Of the Pearl blocks in the past 7 days, 1,694 of 3,739 carried the Nockchain tag, or 45.3%. On Oct 10 it was 54.9%.¹⁶

Pearl shipped v1.5.0 on Oct 13 with security hardening and asked miners and pools to upgrade first.¹⁷ Three small fixes followed, through v1.5.3 on Oct 21.¹⁸ Our reading is that anyone who merge-mines both chains will want both sets of software current.

The bridge holds a bit more

The bridge lock held 1.598 billion of the 2.366 billion NOCK mined, or 67.6%, at 21:38 UTC on Oct 24.¹¹¹² It was 67.4% on Oct 10. The pull request for block 170,000 says bridge withdrawal processing stays disabled.¹ The roadmap still lists withdrawals for Q1 2027, and the seven withdrawal pull requests were last updated on Sep 1.¹⁹²²

The developers worked through pull requests

Since Oct 10, two commits landed on the default branch, and both came through pull requests: #221 and #222.²⁰²¹ In our first Dispatch, 37 of 58 commits had gone in without one. We will keep counting.

New here?

Start with the field guide. The Network page has the live numbers, and the Tracker records every roadmap date and fork notice, with sources.