March has been a busy and productive month for the Nomos project, with significant advancements across Nomos Bedrock, Bedrock Services, the Nomos Zones Ecosystem, and our roadmap to production. From refining Cryptarchia research to implementing key network optimisations, we have continued pushing the boundaries of decentralized infrastructure.

Nomos Bedrock

Our research efforts in Cryptarchia made notable progress this month. The Chain Synchronisation Protocol was refined and finalised, with the final executable specification merged. Additionally, we delved into Cryptarchia v2 research, exploring a two-layer DAG proposal and identifying a bug in PoL v2 which has since been resolved. Work on specifications for the Bedrock Mantle has begun, with Staking Accounts, Payment Model, and Mantle Ledger lines of work in various stages of completion and review.

Work on the Nomos Economic Model continued, incorporating Blend Network integration and refining the token engineering roadmap. The Blob Usage Model was finalized, further advancing our understanding of economic mechanisms within the Nomos ecosystem. Significant developments were made in our network protocol documentation, together with preliminary studies on network peer discovery and bootstrapping mechanisms.

On the development side, we began implementing the Chain Synchronisation Proof-of-Concept. Improvements to node operations included bounded duration support, automatic dependency graph generation, and NTP integration. The Overwatch framework saw several enhancements, such as compile-time checks, improved peer discovery in the PoC phase with Kademlia, and CI action pinning for increased security.

ZK implementation efforts continued, particularly in developing a new Proof of Leadership (PoL) mechanism for the Payment partition. A Python script was created to generate valid inputs, proofs of membership, and non-membership using BN254, achieving impressive performance with sub-second proof generation on a standard laptop CPU.

Nomos Bedrock Services

March saw continued innovation in our NomosDA and Blend Network research. Key highlights include:

• NomosDA: Completed theoretical field extension benchmarks for Nomos DA v2, which was estimated to require sending 1/32 of the original data to validators, compared to 1/256 in v1. Encoding time optimisation efforts significantly reduced processing times from minutes in v1 to an estimated 4-5 seconds in v2.
• Blend Network: Enhancements to the Blend Calculator v4 improved our ability to predict the likelihood of anonymity failures. We finalized the Key Generation Mechanism and Payload Formatting Specification, ensuring a structured approach to resilient anonymous communication. Additionally, we began writing a comprehensive description of the Blend Protocol v1.

In development, work progressed on the Service Declaration Protocol (SDP) core implementation and ledger state transitions. Additional improvements included optimising replication requests, implementing an LRU cache for seen messages, and refining sampling mechanisms for data dispersal.

Nomos Zones Ecosystem

Research was focused on Sovereign Zones, with preliminary studies exploring different design options, and began drafting the Sovereign Zone Specification.

Road to Production, Testnet, and Tooling

Development efforts focused on improving caching, replication request handling, and general system optimisations. Build system enhancements included Risc0 dependency pinning, Docker image fixes, and Windows packaging improvements. Code quality improvements were a priority, with CI checks introduced for removing unused dependencies and enforcing Clippy lints.

Conclusion

Stay tuned for more updates as we continue building a robust and decentralized future for network states with Nomos! As always, we appreciate the support and contributions from our community. If you're interested in getting involved, check out our community. Let's build the future together!