May was an intense and productive month for the Nomos project, with substantial progress across all major areas. The Nomos team focused on refining protocol specifications, implementing critical optimisations, and laying the groundwork for further development in the months ahead. Importantly, the Nomos Whitepaper has been published, providing a great overview of the Nomos project.

Nomos Bedrock

In May, significant improvements were made to the Cryptarchia consensus protocol, including finalising the Bootstrapping Specification. The team also completed the Causal Finality Specification based on the idea developed at the offsite last month, which brings new practical finality guarantees to Nomos. For Mantle, critical updates were made to ensure it integrates smoothly with consensus. The Service Declaration Protocol was refined with simplified data structures and locked identity requirements.

Development focused on enhancing storage systems with new abstractions and block pruning features for better efficiency. Improvements to the P2P network included finalizing the NAT traversal state machine and updates to libp2p for smoother network communication.

Work on the Mantle transaction framework continued, including transaction definitions and mempool improvements. Integration of the fork choice rules and finality mechanisms also progressed, laying the foundation for robust consensus within Nomos.

Nomos Bedrock Services

May brought the finalisation of the NomosDA Cryptographic Protocol Specification, with improvements in proof generation efficiency based on ideas developed at the offsite. Efforts were also focused on improving how nodes are rewarded for providing data availability. Meanwhile, Blend Network’s Proof of Quota was implemented with strong performance benchmarks.

Zones Ecosystem

A highlight in May was the completion of the Nomos Example Sovereign Rollup, a fully operational example demonstrating how to build a sovereign rollup secured by Nomos. This sovereign rollup was developed based on a simple proof of concept first created last month at the offsite. This showcases the potential of building on Nomos and sets the stage for future real-world applications.

Road to Production, Testnet and Tooling

The Overwatch framework, responsible for managing Nomos services, received important updates to improve lifecycle management and reliability. Testing and code quality improvements also continued, ensuring the system remains robust as it grows.

Looking Ahead

With these updates, Nomos continues to strengthen its technical foundations and expand its capabilities. The project remains committed to building resilient, decentralised infrastructure for network states. Stay tuned for further updates about the project, posted monthly on this blog.