Nocktane

Block 170,000 gave miners 84.7 hours of notice, the most of any Nockchain upgrade

info@nocktane.com (Nockadamus) — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 21:49:00 GMT

Nockchain’s developers merged “Security batch 3” on October 19 at 15:22 UTC.¹ Block 170,000 followed on October 23 at 04:00:23 UTC.⁴ The pull request had opened at 15:20:05 UTC on October 19 and named that height, so miners and node operators had 84.7 hours to prepare.¹⁴ Logos held the previous best, at 77.1 hours.¹⁰ The developers earn credit for the extra time, and for shipping a written deployment list and protocol note with the merge.¹²

What changed for miners

Both lanes got a new starting point at block 170,000. The ZK reference rate became 100 billion Tip5 hashes a second, up from 56 billion.³ The AI reference rate doubled from 10 to 20 EMAC/s.³ Each lane’s difficulty re-anchored to the median time of block 169,999, and later blocks adjust as usual.³

Block 170,000 also switched on updated checks for AI proofs. They keep the existing proof program and trusted setup, so the proof format stays the same.²³

Two parts of the package applied on upgrade, ahead of 170,000. Updated transaction checks started at once, and so did 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

How the first blocks went

The 501 block intervals from 170,000 to 170,501 took 94,697 seconds, an average of 189.0 seconds a block.⁴⁵ The protocol aims for 150. Block 170,501, the reward cut, arrived at 06:18 UTC on October 24.⁵

Blocks have sped up since. Blocks 170,750 to 170,850, mined by 21:38 UTC on October 24, averaged 124.5 seconds.⁸ Nockscan’s ZK reading at block 170,855 (21:41 UTC) was 12.36 million proofs a second against a target of 12.65 million. Its AI reading at block 170,856 (21:42 UTC) was 11.11 EMAC/s against a target of 11.00.⁶⁷ Rates before and after 170,000 sit on different starting points, so Nocktane does not compare them.

Lane	Reference rate from 170,000	Realized, Oct 24
ZK, proofs a second	10.00 million	12.36 million
AI, EMAC/s	20	11.11

Fig. 01 Reference rates from the protocol notes next to the rates Nockscan measured at blocks 170,855 (ZK) and 170,856 (AI) on Oct 24, 21:41 and 21:42 UTC. The ZK figure is Nockscan's raw rate divided by 10,000. Sources: nockchain/nockchain, Nockscan

What stays the same

Bridge withdrawal processing stays disabled, as the pull request says.¹ The roadmap lists withdrawals for Q1 2027.⁹

The record so far

Six forks have now activated since July 25. Two were emergency fixes, with 5.3 and 2.7 hours of notice. Four were planned, with 77.1, 10.7, 14.8 and now 84.7 hours.¹⁰ The full tracker holds each one with its sources.

Sources

Dispatch No. 002: Block 170,000 gave miners 84.7 hours of notice, and the reward cut has landed

info@nocktane.com (Nockadamus) — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 21:49:00 GMT

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.

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.

Sources

Block 170,501 landed at 06:18 UTC on October 24, and the block reward is now 1,536 NOCK

info@nocktane.com (Nockadamus) — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 07:53:29 GMT

Block 170,501 was mined at Oct 24, 2026, 06:18 UTC.¹ It is the first block of the fourth reward era in the Aletheia emissions table, and it paid 1,536 NOCK of new issuance: 1,228.8 NOCK to the miner and 307.2 NOCK to the protocol fund.¹³ Block 170,500, mined 4.4 minutes earlier, paid 2,048 NOCK.² This means every block from here on pays 25% less new NOCK than the blocks of the past five months.

The cut block was won in the ZK lane.¹

How the timing compared

On October 10, at that day’s 24-hour average block time, Nocktane estimated the cut for about 22:00 UTC on October 23.⁸ It landed 8.3 hours later than that estimate. Block times move with the amount of work on the network, so a two-week projection carries hours of play.

1,228.8 NOCKNew issuance per block to the miner from block 170,501 on, down from 1,638.4. The protocol fund's per-block share went from 409.6 to 307.2 NOCK.Nockscan, blocks 170,500 and 170,501, coinbase outputs

What changes per day

At the trailing 24-hour average of 184.4 seconds a block, a day holds about 469 blocks.⁴ At that pace, daily new issuance falls from about 959,755 NOCK to about 719,817 NOCK. The protocol fund’s daily inflow goes from about 191,951 NOCK to about 143,963 NOCK. These are Nocktane’s calculations at the measured average. Real days run longer or shorter, and miners also keep all transaction fees, which these figures leave out.

Of the last 99 blocks, 53.5% were won in the AI lane and 46.5% in the ZK lane.⁵

Where supply stands

At block 170,532, 31 blocks after the cut, mined supply stood at 2,365,456,384 NOCK, or 55.1% of the 4,294,967,296 NOCK cap.⁶³ The protocol fund’s balance was 30,085,952 NOCK.⁷

The next step down comes at block 380,501, when the reward falls to 1,024 NOCK.³ At the current average block time that is around January 2028. The live counter on the Network page now points at that block.

Sources

Dispatch No. 001: What changed on Nockchain since July, and what comes next

info@nocktane.com (Nockadamus) — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 12:30:00 GMT

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.

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.

Sources

Nockchain has shipped five forks since July 25. Notice ran from 2.7 to 77.1 hours.

info@nocktane.com (Nockadamus) — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 12:29:00 GMT

At 15:47 UTC on July 25, the @nockchain account made a public promise: “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.”¹ This means every consensus-critical upgrade should get a public testnet, review by multiple entities and a published audit. Then its activation height should be announced with real notice.

Since then, five consensus upgrades have activated, each at its own height. This piece measures one part of that promise: how much notice miners and node operators got. Notice here runs from the first public signal that names the final activation height to the timestamp of the activation block on Nockscan. A signal counts if it is a pull request opened, a commit pushed to the default branch, a tag, or an official post naming the height.

Fork	Height	First public signal (UTC)	Activated (UTC)	Notice	Emergency
Block 112,500 fix	112,500	Jul 25, 21:04	Jul 26, 02:25	5.3 h	Yes
Zoe	119,400	Aug 3, 23:00	Aug 4, 01:39	2.7 h	Yes
Logos	126,000	Aug 10, 20:58	Aug 14, 02:05	77.1 h	No
Anthropos	147,500	Sep 14, 20:36	Sep 15, 07:20	10.7 h	No
154,500 reset	154,500	Sep 25, 21:43	Sep 26, 12:29	14.8 h	No

Fig. 01Notice per fork since July 25, 2026. Emergency marks fixes for mining exploits. Sources: GitHub commit and pull request times, @nockchain posts, Nockscan block timestamps. You can find the same data, with links, in the Fork Notice Log.

The two emergency fixes

The first fix came the same evening. At 21:04 UTC on July 25, about five hours after the promise, a commit went straight to the default branch with no pull request.² It activates a fix at block 112,500.² Block 112,500 arrived 5.3 hours later.¹³

The fix closed a mining channel built on zero-padded composition polynomials and re-anchored the ZK difficulty target.² The repository’s protocol changelog has no specification file for it. The @nockchain account later referred to it as “the coefficient-padding channel closed at 112,500”.³

Zoe followed on August 4. Its pull request opened at 12:26 UTC on August 3 with a proposed height of 120,400.⁴ It merged into the default branch at 23:00 UTC naming block 119,400, and the block arrived at 01:39 UTC, 2.7 hours later.⁴¹³

A commit naming 119,400 had been pushed to the open pull request at 18:24 UTC.⁴ Under the definition above, the merge is the first signal that counts.⁴

Zoe fixed a trace-reuse mining exploit.⁵ The @nockchain account wrote afterward: “Every proof produced this way was a genuinely valid proof.” It added: “Impact was limited to block rewards captured at an inflated effective proof rate.”³

The three planned upgrades

Logos set the high mark for notice. The @nockchain account named block 126,000 at 20:58 UTC on August 10, 77.1 hours before it arrived.⁶¹³ Work on the code continued inside that window.

Eleven commits went to the default branch without pull requests in the final 72 hours. Two were AI proof-of-work changes, one of them a soundness fix.⁷ Its commit says the old code had allowed “a full mining proof whose matmul ran on a matrix the block never committed to”.⁷ The production CUDA miner for the new puzzle merged 11 minutes before block 126,000.⁸

Anthropos opened as pull request #187 at 20:36 UTC on September 14 with height 147,500, and it merged at 23:10 UTC.⁹ It activated at 07:20 UTC on September 15, which gave 10.7 hours of notice.⁹¹³ It moved ZK mining to proof version 5.¹⁰ It also changed the block split “from Logos’s 30% AI / 70% ZK target to 70% AI / 30% ZK”.¹⁰

The 154,500 reset opened as pull request #209 at 21:43 UTC on September 25 and merged 26 minutes later.¹¹ It activated at 12:29 UTC on September 26, which gave 14.8 hours of notice.¹¹¹³ It re-anchored both difficulty lanes and revised how AI proofs are verified.¹² Its cutover notes add: “Bridge withdrawal processing must remain disabled.”¹²

Nocktane found no @nockchain post naming 112,500, 147,500 or 154,500 before those blocks arrived. If one exists and came earlier than the GitHub signal, those notice figures grow, and we will correct the log.

Releases and review

None of the five has a git tag.¹⁴ The newest tag in the repository points to a commit from May 15, and the repository has never published a GitHub Release.¹⁴²²

From July 20 to September 30, 58 commits reached the default branch, and one account authored 49 of them.¹⁵ Thirty-seven reached the branch without a pull request, and the same account pushed all 37, including the 112,500 activation.¹⁵ The last commit on the default branch is the 154,500 release, merged September 25.¹⁵

Pull request #203, titled “Security advisory bundle”, merged 16 minutes after it opened on September 22.¹⁶ The files it changes cite 15 GitHub security advisory identifiers. The repository lists no published security advisories as of October 10.¹⁷

How the split played out

Each of the three planned upgrades moved the share of blocks each puzzle wins. Here is how each one compared with its target. Counting blocks by puzzle type on Nockscan, AI puzzles won 29.5% of blocks under Logos (target 30%), 75.9% under Anthropos (target 70%) and 70.4% from block 154,500 to block 162,773 (target 70%).¹⁸

Over the seven days to 12:09 UTC on October 10, one payout address won most ZK blocks. The top ZK prover won 60.6% of 1,209 ZK blocks, and the top five won 98.1%.¹⁹ In the AI lane, the top miner won 45.7% of 2,762 blocks and the top two won 78.2%.¹⁹ Method: a prover is identified by its first payout address, and the protocol fund’s fixed share inside every block is excluded.

The top ZK address’s daily share has fallen. It ran from 69% to 82% from October 2 to October 6.¹⁸ From October 7 to October 10, it ran from 41% to 54% (October 10 counted to 12:09 UTC).¹⁸

The docs have some catching up to do. The Compute Networks page still describes a target of about 30% AI and 70% ZK blocks, and no docs page mentions Anthropos.²⁰ The repository’s PROTOCOL.md still lists Zoe and Anthropos as draft, although both have activated.²¹

The full table, with every source, lives in the Fork Notice Log. We will add the next fork when its height is first named. That fork has room to match the 77.1 hours of notice Logos gave.

Sources

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

info@nocktane.com (Nockadamus) — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 12:28:00 GMT

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

26.91M NOCKProtocol fund balance: 39.85M received, 12.94M sent.Nockscan API, Oct 10, 2026, 12:06 UTC

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.

Sources

Nockchain's AI lane went live in August and capacity followed. The team says demand is now the constraint.

info@nocktane.com (Nockadamus) — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 12:27:00 GMT

Nockchain’s AI lane is up and running. The live roadmap lists “AI Compute Network Launch” for August 2026, and it is marked completed.² Back in June, the roadmap listed an “AI Compute Market Launch” for June 2026.¹

The upgrade behind it, Logos, added a matrix-multiplication puzzle that Pearl miners also run.²¹ It sits alongside the ZK proof-of-work puzzle.²¹ This means miners now have two ways to win blocks on Nockchain.

The road from June to block 126,000

The first Logos pull request opened on July 18.²² It set activation at block 114,300, with a July 31 target.²² Logan Allen announced that height on July 20: “Logos and AI inference mining are proposed to activate at block 114,300, targeted for the end of this month.”³

Five days later, the @nockchain account moved the target: “Mainnet activation retargets to block 122,000 unless issues are found.”⁴ The Logos code on GitHub never carried that height, and it kept 114,300 until August 11.⁵¹⁰

On July 28, a reviewer described an attack on the new fork-choice rule in a comment on the Logos pull request.⁵ The reviewer wrote that activation should wait for a reviewed fix.⁵

The maintainers’ own write-up followed on July 29: “Activation must remain blocked pending a reviewed fork-choice fix.”²³ The document now lists the issue as resolved.⁶ It says the fix is a rule that credits each block with the expected work at its own puzzle’s target.⁶

The final date came on August 10 at 20:58 UTC: “The new AI Compute Network goes live on Friday (8/14) at Block 126,000. Code is being merged today.”⁷ Block 126,000 arrived at 02:05 UTC on August 14.⁸ The first AI-mined block, 126,859, followed at 16:27 UTC.⁹

The split between the two puzzles changed along the way. Until August 11, the code aimed for about 60% AI blocks.¹⁰ The commit that set the final height changed the target to about 30% AI and 70% ZK.¹⁰ A month later, the Anthropos upgrade at block 147,500 flipped it to 70% AI and 30% ZK.¹¹

Blocks are landing close to that target. Over the seven days to 12:06 UTC on October 10, AI puzzles won 69.6% of 3,971 blocks, counted by puzzle type in Nockscan’s prover statistics.¹²

Capacity followed

Nockscan measures the AI lane in multiply-accumulates per second. Over a trailing seven-day window, it read about 0.06 EMAC/s on August 16, two days after activation.¹³

Nockscan restarted the series at block 154,500, when a coordinated upgrade re-anchored both difficulty lanes.¹³¹¹ Readings from before that block can’t be compared with readings after it.¹³ Within the new series, the same seven-day measure rose from 12.5 EMAC/s at block 154,530 on September 26 to 23.0 EMAC/s at 12:45 UTC on October 10.¹³

Three weeks into the lane, the team described the next problem in a post on September 4: “Capacity is no longer the constraint. Demand is: turning it into inference someone paid for.”¹⁴

Routing and Lockstep

The roadmap’s plan for demand is the “Useful Inference Routing Protocol”.² It is listed for Q4 2026 with status current.² The roadmap describes it as “A major milestone that funnels compute demand into the AI Compute Network.”² It is absent from the Internet Archive’s June 16 capture of the roadmap and appears in the next capture, on September 30.¹²⁴

The team has also shared new research. On September 10, @nockchain published Lockstep, a paper and code release on verifiable inference.¹⁵

The 27-page paper defines a canonical inference contract for dense and mixture-of-experts transformer models.¹⁶ Under that contract, an optimized GPU engine and a portable CPU reference must return bit-identical outputs.¹⁶ The paper reports identical digests from the same source on Hopper, Ada and Blackwell GPUs.¹⁶

The serving implementation is a vLLM plugin that the paper describes as proprietary.¹⁶ The public release carries the specification, CPU references, a Lean formalization and conformance kits.¹⁵¹⁶ The paper also specifies a sampled-replay audit, with its primitives gated and integration disabled.¹⁶ It is open about its own limit: “Canonical execution is not a cryptographic proof”.¹⁶

Every use of “routing” in the paper refers to expert routing inside mixture-of-experts models.¹⁶ The paper never mentions Nockchain or proof-of-work.¹⁶ In Nocktane’s reading, the paper specifies the inference function itself and leaves the routing of paid requests to other work.

The announcement places Lockstep at the service layer, where “it can give customers and auditors a precise meaning for the inference work being routed among independent providers,” and adds that “the integration is not live and Lockstep is not currently a Nockchain consensus rule.”¹⁵ Nocktane found no published specification for the routing protocol as of October 10. That specification is the next piece to watch for.

The usefulness debate

In June, Abhinaba Basu posted “The Usefulness Gap in Proof-of-Useful-Work” to arXiv.¹⁷ The paper studies Pearl. Its headline finding is that Pearl’s network “produces zero useful AI computation.”¹⁷

The paper says Pearl’s verifier checks that a matrix multiplication was computed correctly.¹⁷ According to the paper, the verifier does not check whether the matrices came from an AI model, so miners can earn rewards on random matrices.¹⁷ An open-source miner Basu wrote had 44 shares accepted by a pool using random matrices.¹⁷

Logan Allen answered on September 2: “I didn’t find this paper’s methodology to be compelling.”¹⁸ The post argues that networks like this start out farmed by GPUs chasing the subsidy.¹⁸ It adds that the pieces needed for useful inference routing already exist and need a small amount of further work.¹⁸ On October 4, Allen described Pearl compatibility as a starting move: “Bootstrapping our AI puzzle with Pearl merge-mining compatibility was a tactic chosen to broaden mining distribution and improve initial network security.”¹⁹

Nockchain’s AI puzzle is Pearl-compatible by design.²¹ The Logos specification describes its matrices as “miner-chosen (arbitrary model, Pearl parity)”.²¹ Merge-mining is near universal in recent blocks: of the 7,043 AI blocks among the last 10,000 blocks, 7,042 declare a Pearl merge-mining commitment (Nockscan, 12:47 UTC on October 10).²⁰

The paper’s argument is therefore relevant to Nockchain’s lane too. That link is Nocktane’s inference. The paper itself never mentions Nockchain.

Next on the roadmap is the routing protocol. The roadmap describes it as the milestone that “funnels compute demand into the AI Compute Network” and lists it for Q4 2026.² Our tracker will record whether that date holds.

Sources

Two thirds of all mined NOCK now sits in the bridge to Base

info@nocktane.com (Nockadamus) — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 12:26:00 GMT

At 12:06 UTC on October 10, the Nockchain address that locks NOCK for the bridge to Base held 1,583,415,023 NOCK.¹ All NOCK mined to date came to 2,349,590,528 NOCK, counted as the sum of every unspent note on the chain.² The lock holds 67.4% of it. This means about two of every three NOCK mined so far sit in the bridge lock.

How you count changes the last decimal. Nockscan’s bridge summary also reports gross deposits of 1,588,871,548 NOCK, which would put the share at 67.6%.³ Gross deposits include NOCK that later left the lock, so we use the lock’s balance.

Nockscan’s ledger for the lock address shows seven outgoing transfers since January, totalling 5.30M NOCK.¹ The latest was on September 16, and Nockscan gives no label for them.¹

Where it goes

A valid deposit locks your NOCK on Nockchain and mints wrapped NOCK on Base, an Ethereum layer 2 network. GeckoTerminal reported 1,576,871,489 wrapped NOCK on Base at 12:06 UTC.⁴

According to NCC’s documentation, “The bridge runs across five nodes operated by the four parties, so that moving assets always takes the cooperation of more than one of them.”⁵ The four parties are NCC, NockBox, Southwest Pool Supply Co. and Lambda Collective.⁵

Deposits keep coming in. Nockscan recorded 5,500,184 NOCK deposited in the 24 hours to 12:06 UTC on October 10, in three deposits still awaiting confirmations.³

The way back

If you hold wrapped NOCK on Base, moving it back to Nockchain requires withdrawal processing. The project’s own documents say it is off. The pull request for the September 26 upgrade states that “bridge withdrawal processing remains disabled.”⁶ The cutover notes for that upgrade put it more firmly: “Bridge withdrawal processing must remain disabled.”⁷

The switch exists because of an incident in August. Pull request #166, opened August 22 and merged August 30, reports: “Bridge node 2 reached %create-withdrawal-tx while withdrawals were intended to be operationally paused.”⁸ The node’s signing key failed a membership check, and the halt it caused spread to two other bridge nodes. The fix added a setting, withdrawal_processing_enabled, that is off by default.⁸

The withdrawal code itself waits in seven stacked pull requests, numbers 169 to 175. All seven were opened within two minutes on September 1, and all were last updated at 06:01 UTC that day. None has a comment or a review.⁹¹⁰ Even once that code is merged, turning withdrawals on would take operator action, according to the last of them: “An operator must enable admission.”¹⁰

The roadmap date

The earliest archived copy of the roadmap, from January 18, listed Bridge Withdrawals for Q1 2026, as planned.¹¹ Nockchain’s “Roadmap 2026” post of January 16 also put “Robust bridge withdrawal support” in its first phase, for Q1 2026.¹⁴ By June 16, the date was Q2 2026 and the status was current.¹²

The live roadmap now lists Q1 2027, as planned.¹³ That is four quarters later than the first date, and it moved the item from current back to planned.

You can follow withdrawals in our Bridge Watch, which updates with every build, and on the Roadmap Tracker.

Sources

What the 25% reward cut at block 170,501 means for miners

info@nocktane.com (Nockadamus) — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 12:25:00 GMT

Nockchain’s block reward drops by a quarter at block 170,501, from 2,048 NOCK to 1,536 NOCK.¹ The cut is set in the emissions table of the Aletheia specification, which activated at block 65,500 in May.¹ This means each block you find from that height on pays 25% less new NOCK.

When block 162,777 was mined at 11:56 UTC on October 10, 7,724 blocks remained before block 170,501.³ Nockscan’s trailing 576-block average, about 24 hours of blocks, was 150.1 seconds a block.² At that pace, block 170,501 arrives at about 22:00 UTC on October 23.² The estimate moves with every block. The counter above refreshes every minute while you have this page open.

The schedule

Era	Blocks	Reward per block	NOCK issued in the era
3	65,501 to 170,500	2,048	215,040,000
4	170,501 to 380,500	1,536	322,560,000
5	380,501 to 590,500	1,024	215,040,000

Fig. 01Reward eras around the cut, from the Aletheia emissions table. Eras 4 to 12 each last 210,000 blocks. After that, a 64-NOCK tail runs to block 16,144,876.

The specification caps total issuance at 2³², or 4,294,967,296 NOCK.¹ Issuance reaches that cap at block 16,144,876.¹ At block 162,777, mined at 11:56 UTC on October 10, mined supply stood at 2,349,590,528 NOCK, or 54.7% of the cap.⁶

What miners and the fund receive

Since Aletheia, the new NOCK in each block goes 80% to the miner and 20% to the protocol fund. The specification is clear that the split covers new issuance only: “The percentages apply only to that block’s new issuance, not total or circulating supply, previously issued NOCK, or transaction fees.”¹

1,638.4 to 1,228.8NOCK of new issuance the miner receives per block, before and after block 170,501. The protocol fund's share moves from 409.6 to 307.2 NOCK.Nocktane arithmetic from the Aletheia schedule and the 80/20 split

On Nockscan, the fund currently receives 409.6 NOCK per block, which matches 20% of 2,048.⁷

The protocol’s target is roughly 150 seconds a block. Since Anthropos, that target has been 149.86 seconds. At that pace, a day holds about 576 blocks.

On that basis, daily issuance falls from 1,179,648 NOCK to 884,736 NOCK. The fund’s daily share of new issuance goes from about 235,930 NOCK to about 176,947 NOCK. These are Nocktane’s calculations at the target block time. Real days run longer or shorter.

Miners also keep all transaction fees, which these figures leave out.

For AI and ZK miners

Since the Anthropos upgrade, the protocol aims to give 70% of blocks to the AI puzzle and 30% to the ZK puzzle.⁵ Nockscan’s 7-day count is close to that, with 69.6% AI and 30.4% ZK as of 12:06 UTC on October 10.⁴

At the targets, miners in the AI lane together collect about 660,603 NOCK a day before the cut and about 495,452 after. Miners in the ZK lane go from about 283,116 to about 212,337. Again, these are Nocktane’s calculations at a 150-second block time and the 70/30 split.

In NOCK terms, every block pays 25% less from block 170,501 on. What that means in dollars depends on the price of NOCK, which Nocktane does not forecast.

The next step down comes at block 380,501, when the reward falls to 1,024 NOCK.¹ We will report what this cut changed once the block has passed.

Sources

Pearl's market cap is 7.3 times Nockchain's, and the two chains share miners

info@nocktane.com (Nockadamus) — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 12:24:00 GMT

At 12:05 UTC on October 10, CoinGecko’s five-minute market data valued Pearl at $464.5 million and Nockchain at $63.6 million.²⁰²¹ This means Pearl’s market capitalization was 7.3 times Nockchain’s. The two chains also share miners, as we explain later in this piece.

The gap was much smaller three months ago. Measured at 00:00 UTC each day, the ratio stood at 2.1x on July 21, 1.1x on September 13 and 9.9x on October 9.³⁴ NOCK’s price then rose from $0.01987 at 00:00 UTC on October 9 to $0.02708 at 12:05 UTC on October 10, bringing the ratio back to 7.3x.³²¹

Date (00:00 UTC unless noted)	Pearl market cap	Nockchain market cap	Ratio
Jul 21	$74.0M	$34.6M	2.1x
Aug 14	$66.3M	$21.1M	3.1x
Sep 13	$127.6M	$116.8M	1.1x
Oct 9	$460.2M	$46.6M	9.9x
Oct 10, 12:05	$464.5M	$63.6M	7.3x

Fig. 01Pearl's market cap divided by Nockchain's, from CoinGecko daily market caps. The last row uses CoinGecko's five-minute data. You can find a 90-day chart of the ratio on the Network page.

On hourly data, NOCK’s low in the window was $0.00823 at 11:00 UTC on August 14.⁵ Its high was $0.05326 at 02:00 UTC on September 13.⁵ It traded at $0.02708 at 12:05 UTC on October 10.²¹ On CoinGecko, Pearl’s all-time high is $1.76, set on September 23.¹

Nockchain’s Logos upgrade added an AI proof-of-work lane. Its certificate binds the same parameters a Pearl proof binds, so one unit of matrix-multiplication work can count on both chains.⁶ A miner commits to the Nockchain block inside the Pearl coinbase under a tag, NOCKCHAIN-AI-POW-AUX. The tag can appear only once, so one Pearl proof authorizes one Nockchain block.⁶

Nockscan’s merge-mining data, fetched at 12:47 UTC on October 10, shows how much of each chain this covers. Its scan window holds 10,000 blocks. Of the 7,043 Nockchain AI blocks in that window, 7,042 declare a Pearl commitment. Over the seven days to that time, 1,759 of 3,206 Pearl blocks carried the Nockchain tag. That is 54.9% of them.⁷

Logan Allen wrote the Logos specification.⁶ Allen’s X profile reads “Founder @nockchain”.⁹ On October 4, Allen described the compatibility as a starting move: “Bootstrapping our AI puzzle with Pearl merge-mining compatibility was a tactic chosen to broaden mining distribution and improve initial network security.”⁸

What Pearl is

Pearl is a layer-1 proof-of-work chain whose code timestamps its mainnet genesis block at 09:00 UTC on April 27, 2026.¹⁰ Its mining protocol comes from a 2025 paper by Ilan Komargodski and Omri Weinstein on proofs of useful work from matrix multiplication.¹¹ Pearl’s current whitepaper, dated September 2026, specifies FP8 matrix multiplication as the unit of mining work.¹² An FP8 fork sits on an unmerged branch of Pearl’s code. As of October 10, it had no mainnet activation height.¹³

Nockchain’s AI lane binds Pearl’s integer (INT8) parameters.⁶ If Pearl activates FP8 on mainnet, merge-mining would then depend on a matching Nockchain update. That is Nocktane’s inference. As of October 10, Nocktane found no statement from either team saying so.

A separate issue is open on Nockchain’s GitHub, filed October 7. It reports that some Pearl merge-mining candidates pass the work target and then fail Nockchain’s proof verification. As of October 10, it had no replies.¹⁴

The third chain

FLOP is the newest of the three. Flop Labs announced the Flop Network on August 18.¹⁵ In a post the same day, Arthur Hayes wrote “I’m coming out of retirement to lead @flop_labs” and gave a genesis target of “Q1 27”.¹⁶ On September 7, Hayes linked a project introduction at flop.finance/intro.¹⁷ That page now carries a “Draft whitepaper” label, and the current whitepaper draft is dated September 25.¹⁷¹⁸

In FLOP’s design, AI agents are the buyers. They pay miners in FLOP to run inference on a named model. Miners must show that the requested model ran. They do this through commitments to the model’s internal activations and optimistic re-execution with slashing, settled by a validator quorum.¹⁸¹⁹

Pearl’s protocol verifies the miner’s matrix multiplication.¹² FLOP’s design checks that the requested model produced the inference.¹⁸ Nockchain merge-mines Pearl-compatible work today. Its roadmap lists a “Useful Inference Routing Protocol” for Q4 2026, “a major milestone that funnels compute demand into the AI Compute Network”.²²

Of the two chains that trade, the market prices Pearl higher. At 12:45 UTC on October 10, CoinGecko listed FLOP as a preview with no price.²³ Nocktane does not forecast prices.

Sources

Nockchain in October 2026: a field guide for miners, holders and builders

info@nocktane.com (Nockadamus) — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 12:23:00 GMT

This guide shows Nockchain as it stands on October 10, 2026. Much of it changed in the last three months, and it will change again. That is why each section ends with a place where you can check the facts yourself. If a term is new to you, our glossary explains it.

The money

NOCK is the chain’s coin. One NOCK splits into 65,536 (2^16) units called nicks, and total issuance is capped at 2^32 NOCK, about 4.29 billion.¹² If you hold NOCK, your coins live in notes, Nockchain’s version of unspent outputs.¹⁸ As of October 10, 2.35 billion NOCK had been mined, a little over half the cap.¹⁵

Each block pays 2,048 new NOCK today. Since the Aletheia upgrade at block 65,500, 80% goes to the miner and 20% goes to a protocol fund. The reward falls to 1,536 NOCK at block 170,501.² At the 24-hour average block time of about 150 seconds, the block is expected around October 23.¹⁶

Check it: the emissions table in 014-aletheia.md, and Nockscan’s supply-audit and epoch-progress endpoints.

Two ways to mine

Nockchain began with a single puzzle: miners produce zero-knowledge proofs, and the chain rewards the work.³ On August 14, at block 126,000,¹⁹ the Logos upgrade went live. It added a second puzzle built on matrix multiplication, compatible with the work Pearl miners do.³ If you mine, you can now win a block either way.

The split between the two lanes has changed twice. Logos aimed for 30% AI blocks and 70% ZK blocks. Anthropos, at block 147,500 on September 15,²⁰ flipped that to 70% AI and 30% ZK.⁴ Under Anthropos, blocks come every 150 seconds or so across both lanes.⁴

Each lane adjusts its own difficulty. To see the current mix, Nockscan’s mining-metrics counts about the last 100 blocks by puzzle.⁵

Check it: Nockscan’s mining-metrics for recent blocks by puzzle, and prover-stats?period=7d for seven days split by lane. Our Network page shows both, with the method for each.

Who runs what

Zorp, the company that built Nockchain, announced on July 20 that it is winding down.⁶ In June, Zorp transferred the trademark, domains and GitHub repositories to Nock Community Co. (NCC).⁷ NCC is a non-stock corporation and the beneficiary of the protocol fund.⁷

NCC shares signatory roles for the protocol fund and the bridge to Base with three other parties.⁸ They are NockBox, Southwest Pool Supply Co. and Lambda Collective.⁸ Lambda Collective also runs Nockscan, the explorer our chain figures come from.⁹

National Compute, Logan Allen’s new company, was announced the same day Zorp announced its wind-down.¹⁰ Logan Allen signs the Logos specification as “Logan Allen (National Compute Co)”.³

A separate company, National Compute Labs PBC, runs nationalcompute.com, which describes “The National Compute Grid”.²¹ On October 7, Anjney Midha posted that “hundreds of MI355x and B300 nodes” were live on that site.¹⁷ We found no stated link between that company and Nockchain.

Check it: NCC’s page in the Nockchain docs, and the posts linked in our Governance report.

The bridge

A bridge carries NOCK to Base, an Ethereum layer 2, as a wrapped token at contract 0x9B5E262cF9bb04869ab40b19AF91D2dc85761722.²² At 12:06 UTC on October 10, the lock address on Nockchain held 1.583 billion NOCK, 67.4% of the 2.35 billion mined.¹¹¹⁵

The trip back is closed. The pull request for the September 26 upgrade says “bridge withdrawal processing remains disabled.”¹² The roadmap lists withdrawals for Q1 2027.¹³

Check it: Nockscan’s bridge endpoint and the lock address, our Bridge report and Bridge Watch.

The roadmap

The roadmap at nockchain.org lists one current item, the “Useful Inference Routing Protocol”, for Q4 2026. For Q1 2027, it lists bridge withdrawals, the full Nock ZKVM, a ZK verification opcode and forced data availability.¹³ A privacy pool application follows in Q2 2027.¹³

Earlier versions of the page gave earlier dates. In January, the page listed bridge withdrawals for Q1 2026, and in June it listed them for Q2 2026. The June page also listed the full ZKVM and the ZK opcode for Q3 2026. It put forced data availability and the privacy pool in Q4 2026.²³²⁴

Check it: the live page, and our Roadmap Tracker, which links each date to an archived snapshot.

Where to check each piece

What you want to know	Where to look
Block height, reward and the next cut	Nockscan `tip`, `mining-metrics` (`blockRewardNock`), `epoch-progress`
Share of AI and ZK blocks	Nockscan `mining-metrics`, `prover-stats?period=7d`
The rules for each upgrade	`changelog/protocol/` in nockchain/nockchain
Who holds the brand	Zorp’s July 20 post and Nockchain’s July 22 post
Who governs the fund	NCC’s page in the Nockchain docs
Bridge balance and deposits	Nockscan `bridge`, the lock address
Roadmap dates, then and now	nockchain.org/roadmap and its Wayback snapshots
NOCK price and market cap	CoinGecko API, id `nockchain`

Fig. 01Primary sources for each part of this guide. Nockscan documents its API at nockscan.com/api.

Nockscan shows up in three rows of that table. Its API documentation is public,¹⁴ and if you run a Nockchain node, you can compare Nockscan’s numbers with your own.

Nocktane

Block 170,000 gave miners 84.7 hours of notice, the most of any Nockchain upgrade

What changed for miners

How the first blocks went

What stays the same

The record so far

Sources

Dispatch No. 002: Block 170,000 gave miners 84.7 hours of notice, and the reward cut has landed

Block 170,000 gave miners 84.7 hours

The reward cut landed on Oct 24

ZK mining spread out

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

The bridge holds a bit more

The developers worked through pull requests

New here?

Sources

Block 170,501 landed at 06:18 UTC on October 24, and the block reward is now 1,536 NOCK

How the timing compared

What changes per day

Where supply stands

Sources

Dispatch No. 001: What changed on Nockchain since July, and what comes next

Zorp winds down, NCC steps in

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

Five forks, most on hours of notice

Two thirds of mined NOCK sits in the bridge

The block reward drops in about two weeks

Pearl moved ahead, and the two chains share mining hardware

New here?

Sources

Nockchain has shipped five forks since July 25. Notice ran from 2.7 to 77.1 hours.

The two emergency fixes

The three planned upgrades

Releases and review

How the split played out

Sources

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

What NCC is

How the fund works, according to NCC

What NCC promised, and where things stand

Sources

Nockchain's AI lane went live in August and capacity followed. The team says demand is now the constraint.

The road from June to block 126,000

Capacity followed

Routing and Lockstep

The usefulness debate

Sources

Two thirds of all mined NOCK now sits in the bridge to Base

Where it goes

The way back

The roadmap date

Sources

What the 25% reward cut at block 170,501 means for miners

The schedule

What miners and the fund receive

For AI and ZK miners

Sources

Pearl's market cap is 7.3 times Nockchain's, and the two chains share miners

How the two chains share miners

What Pearl is

The third chain

Sources

Nockchain in October 2026: a field guide for miners, holders and builders

The money

Two ways to mine

Who runs what

The bridge

The roadmap

Where to check each piece

Sources