Welcome to the January 2025 update for the Nomos project! This month has been packed with progress across multiple areas, from research advancements to critical development updates. Here’s a breakdown of our key achievements.

Nomos Bedrock

Research efforts in January focused on finalising the Cryptarchia v1 protocol specifications, which are now undergoing review. The Nomos Economic Model also saw continued development, integrating various markets on the Nomos Bedrock. Indexed Merkle Tree (IMT) benchmarking was finalised this month, showing a significant improvement in proof times compared to the Sparse Merkle Tree approach. Work is ongoing to refine execution models for the Coordination Layer, ensuring optimal efficiency in managing transactions and proofs.

Nomos Bedrock Services

Major progress was achieved on the Role Declaration Protocol, previously known as the Core Validator Set (CVS) Protocol, with a finalised specification detailing role management and epoch-based Proof of Validation (PoV) refreshment.

The Blend Network team made substantial progress in January, particularly in analyzing communication reliability and anonymity failure probabilities within the network. By modeling broadcasting on branching trees, the team derived recursive equations for failure probabilities and validated them with simulation results.

On the development front, connection management saw key improvements. Multiple PRs were submitted to refine connection handling, including better policies for managing maximum connections and handling malicious peers. The connection manager for DA continues to evolve in alignment with Blend Network’s architectural updates.

Road to Mainnet, Testnet and Tooling

January saw a concerted effort to improve Nomos’ testnet infrastructure. Several updates were made to bundling processes, resulting in stable package distributions for multiple platforms, including Linux and macOS. Key management received improvements with the development of a preload KMS backend, which will enhance security and efficiency for validator operations. Additionally, state recovery functionalities were merged, bringing a more robust failover system to the network.

Looking Ahead

January was a good start to the year for Nomos, with substantial progress in protocol specification, research refinements, and infrastructure enhancements. As we move into February, expect continued refinements and deeper integration work leading up to the next major milestones.

Stay tuned for more updates, and as always, thank you for your support!