2024 has been an action-packed year of great progress for Nomos. The research team gained a lot of clarity on the technical problems facing the project, and the engineering team made substantial progress on implementing working models of certain parts of the architecture. This progress has brought the vision of an initial Nomos prototype much closer to reality, but there’s still a lot of work left to do in the coming year. Read on to find out more about how far we’ve come since this past January, and get a sneak peek at our plans for 2025.

Major Achievements

The Nomos team’s major achievements over the past year have involved finalising the specifications and initial implementations of various components of the network’s architecture. The most important milestones reached, in terms of progress toward our initial prototype (aka “V1”), are:

Data Availability Nearly Complete

The Nomos network’s data availability solution, known as NomosDA, is nearly finalised in both research and implementation. Apart from some potential improvements planned for future prototype iterations, this DA solution is thoroughly defined and its properties have been shown to be sufficient for the purposes of the V1. The three core data availability processes of Encoding, Verification, and Reconstruction have working implementations with very favourable performance times, and the network protocols of Dispersal, Replication, and Sampling are running well in simulations.

Consensus Ready for V1

The Nomos team has designed and implemented Cryptarchia, a consensus protocol that will enable the Nomos network to select block leaders using the Private Proof of Stake (PPoS) consensus mechanism. Cryptarchia’s properties are sufficient for the purposes of our V1, providing credible neutrality and reducing the risk of self-censorship when combined with the Blendnet (see below). However, our research team has also identified several areas for further improving Cryptarchia, which will be thoroughly investigated for future prototype iterations.

Blendnet Revised and Re-specified

Despite the Nomos Blendnet (formerly Mixnet) having been almost completely redesigned over the past few months, our team has already produced specifications and implementations for most of the core functionalities. This redesign of our message propagation system has been well worth the effort, with the new Blendnet exhibiting much more desirable properties. The core functionalities we have implemented include establishing persistent transmission patterns to make network analysis difficult, encrypting and randomly delaying message relay, and cover traffic to create message unlinkability. The statistical properties of these functionalities have been verified in simulations. The final component of the Blendnet design - namely, incentives for “lazy” nodes - is something that remains to be completed for the initial specification.

Progress Continues on Coordination Layer and Native Zones

As one of the key differentiators of the Nomos project, the architecture of the Coordination Layer and Native Zones has received special attention from our research team. When fully designed and implemented, Native Zones will give developers a ready-to-use platform with significant autonomy and all the privacy properties provided by Nomos. The Coordination Layer is intended to facilitate PPoS, private transactions, zone verification, composability, and more.

A breakthrough in this area has been a design and proof of concept for Private Atomic Cross-Zone Transactions (PACTs). PACTs allow users to privately spend and consume notes from multiple zones in a single transaction, with validators balancing notes entering and exiting each zone to ensure the transaction’s validity. We have also solved the problem of supporting atomic inclusion, enabling use cases like transferring an asset to another zone and swapping it in one transaction.

Testnet Infrastructure Built

The Nomos engineering team has been hard at work creating components of a private Nomos testnet, used internally for testing purposes. At this point, we have working validator nodes that have a mempool and can participate in consensus, data availability, and Blendnet message relaying. We also have functioning zone executor nodes that can engage in data availability encoding and dispersal, and testing clients that can create transactions and perform DA sampling. The Nomos testnet includes running instances of all of these types of network participants - enabling our team to simulate the workings of the Nomos network.

Goals for 2025

Nomos’ most important goal for 2025 is the full specification of the first iteration of the project. While an ambitious target, the progress made in the past year has paved the way for this goal to be reached fairly soon. The completion of the V1 specifications will give us clarity on the structure and properties of the Nomos network, and will allow the team to focus more on building and testing the initial prototype.

In terms of this prototype, the highest priority items are the implementations of the Base Layer components. Since Cryptarchia is already implemented, this effort will mainly focus on a few additions to NomosDA and completing the implementation of the Blendnet. Then, if that is done, the team will move on to the Coordination Layer, and finally to building a wallet for users and tools for developers on zones.

Conclusion

With the vision of a complete specification for the Nomos project now on the horizon, the team is more than ready to head into 2025. The hard work of the past year - both throughout the world where our core contributors live, as well as at our dynamic offsites in France and Thailand - has produced tremendous results in terms of the state of the project. To best keep track of the latest developments in Nomos, stay tuned by reading the Nomos blog as we continue our exciting journey in building a sovereign blockchain for Network States.