Zorp is winding down, and Nock Community Co. now holds Nockchain's brand and code

Zorp, the company that built Nockchain, said on July 20 that it is winding down. In June, Zorp had moved Nockchain’s trademark, domains and GitHub repositories to Nock Community Co.² This means the name and the code that miners, holders and builders use now sit with NCC.

Zorp’s post went up at 13:37 UTC: “Due to various circumstances, Zorp could not find a way to sustain itself in perpetuity, and is winding down.”¹ The article was edited at 15:03 UTC. The quoted sentence comes from the current version.

Two days later, the @nockchain account shared where Zorp’s assets went. “In June, it transferred Nockchain’s community-facing assets”, the article reads. It names the trademark, the domains and the GitHub repositories. They went to Nock Community Co., “a non-stock corporation set up to hold them for the benefit of the ecosystem and the miners who secure the chain.”²

What NCC is

The July 22 article describes NCC this way: “Nock Community Co. has no equity holders and no product. It is the beneficiary of the 20% protocol fund, which it governs and distributes to projects that advance core development, the zkVM, and the broader ecosystem.”²

The same article introduces the board: “Joining Logan on the board are officers of SWPS Co. and Nockbox, along with a long trusted community member and advisor. We intend to name a fifth director in the coming months.”² The article names no one else and gives no surname. Nocktane takes Logan to be Logan Allen, who signs the Logos upgrade specification as “Logan Allen (National Compute Co)”.⁴

SWPS is Southwest Pool Supply Co., a Nockchain infrastructure company. NockBox is another. NCC’s docs say both help operate the bridge to Base and the protocol fund.¹⁴¹⁵

Twenty-five minutes after Zorp’s post, at 14:02 UTC on July 20, Logan announced a new company: “I’m going to build the first of these Compute Networks myself, in a new company called National Compute.”³ Its site is nationalcompute.io.¹¹

A different National Compute launched the “National Compute Grid” at nationalcompute.com on October 7. That site names National Compute Labs PBC.¹⁶ The Logos specification gives Logan Allen’s company as National Compute Co.⁴ Anjney Midha announced the grid’s launch on X.¹²

How the fund works, according to NCC

Since the Aletheia upgrade at block 65,500, miners receive 80% of each block’s new issuance, and 20% goes to a protocol fund.⁶ At today’s reward of 2,048 NOCK, the fund gets 409.6 NOCK a block.

NCC’s docs describe the fund as a multisignature wallet that holds this 20% share. The docs say: “Disbursements for protocol development require approval from a quorum of the signatories.” The signatories come from four parties: NCC, NockBox, Southwest Pool Supply Co. and Lambda Collective.⁵

The docs do not give the quorum size or the number of signatories. On custody, they say: “It does not take custody of user assets: bridge transfers execute automatically through protocol-level mechanisms, and the protocol fund is administered collectively rather than held by any single party.”⁵

Those are the fund’s lifetime totals at the address 9EhcJiGh...7p6Up, as Nockscan reports them.⁷ Lambda Collective, one of the four signatory parties, runs Nockscan.⁸ Nockscan’s indexer came from NockBox, another of the four, according to an August 5 post.⁹ If you want an independent check of the current balance, you can run your own Nockchain node.

What NCC promised, and where things stand

The July 22 article set out a short list of next steps: “Over the coming weeks: the zkVM roadmap, the governance framework, the fifth director, and a clearer picture of the market registration path.”² It also said the governance framework “will be transparent and public-facing”.²

As of October 10, 80 days later, Nocktane found no named fifth director and no published governance framework. We checked @nockchain’s posts back to July 22, the Nockchain docs index and the nockchain GitHub organization.¹³ The docs page on NCC was last updated on September 9, and its Governance section covers board makeup and custody.⁵ That section does not describe a proposal process.⁵

One more commitment came on July 25, in @nockchain’s voice: “From here on out, every consensus-critical upgrade takes the same path: public testnet, multiple-entity review, published audit, then an activation height announced with real notice.”¹⁰ The same article credits NCC with the decision to launch the Logos upgrade on a testnet first.¹⁰

Five consensus upgrades went live after that, at heights 112,500, 119,400, 126,000, 147,500 and 154,500. Two of them, at 112,500 and 119,400, closed mining issues that @nockchain described in its August 5 post.⁹ You can see the notice each one got in our Fork Notice Log. Our Mining report walks through all five.

We will update this piece when NCC names a director or publishes its framework.