September was a month of intensive engineering progress across Nomos. From advances in cryptographic design and zero-knowledge components to major steps in consensus development, wallet integration, and service-level improvements, the project continued to move closer to testnet readiness. Strategic partnerships and community outreach also took center stage, with preparations for upcoming events and new ecosystem development initiatives.

Nomos Bedrock

Research

Cryptography was a central focus of research efforts throughout September. The ongoing general cryptography audit continued to review repositories in depth, with issues documented and slated for fixes. Work to speed up block validation and batch verification was finalised into an implementation plan. The Nomos team also explored univariate vs bivariate PCS optimizations and completed toy implementations to analyze complexity tradeoffs.

On the tokenomics side, the first version of a dynamic stake estimation model was prepared and refined to capture validator entry and exit behaviors based on reward-to-stake ratios. Proof of Stake simulations continued to expand, incorporating data storage markets and validator behavioral modeling. The NomosDA rewarding framework was also updated, simplifying opinion calculations to remove floating-point operations for greater consistency.

Development

Development efforts were wide-ranging and touched nearly every component of Bedrock. In zero-knowledge components, the migration of Proof of Leadership to Groth16 was completed, fully removing reliance on RISC0 on Bedrock. The key management system (KMS) was redesigned to flexibly support ZK key types, with integrations for Mantle public key derivation, zeroisation of secret keys, and new macros to future-proof key management. A ZkSign module was also readied for integration.

Cryptarchia development focused on block reconstruction from proposals, blob validation during bootstrapping, and mempool improvements. Transaction storage was expanded to enable full proposal reconstruction from references. Refactoring separated chain-following into bootstrapping and online states, and the introduction of early termination logic for initial block download (IBD) improved efficiency. The chain service and membership integration were advanced so proofs and proof parameters can be fetched reliably.

Wallet integration saw major progress, with wallet crates and services merged, which would enabling wallet synchronisation with Cryptarchia when completed. Infrastructure work included unified encoding refactors to eliminate redundant conversions and NAT traversal and address handling optimisations The project also began migrating the codebase to big-endian representation for consistency in wire formats.

Nomos Bedrock Services

Development

Proof of Quota and Proof of Selection implementations advanced with API integration into the Blend stack. Supporting ZK work included integration of Poseidon2, export of hashing types, generic witness generator refactors, and utilities for compressed proof sizes and field element serialisation. Blend development integrated Proof of Quota and Proof of Selection into message crates and core libraries, with test coverage expanded. Session transition logic for Blend core, edge, and backend services was implemented across multiple PRs to make session lifecycle handling robust.

Data Availability work delivered a DA Verifier mempool adapter (removing mocked components), request sampling refactors for improved responsiveness, and membership session enhancements. Opinion aggregation and activity proof formation pipelines for rewards calculation were prototyped and are being folded into the SDP service.

Road to Production, Testnet, and Tooling

The project invested heavily in test quality and performance tooling. These included CI timing and resource allocation fixes, as well as serial integration tests and improved port allocation. Runtime profiling and observability were added via Tokio console for async task monitoring and pprof with flame-graph generation to identify CPU hotspots. A C FFI layer (nomos-c) progressed to expose start/stop APIs for logos-core integration. Clippy lint enforcement, Rust 1.90 adoption, and migration to the Rust 2024 edition were undertaken to standardise workspace quality.

Conclusion

September was a month of solid technical advancement paired with strategic ecosystem development. With major cryptography and consensus research milestones and key engineering integrations, the Nomos project continues to build momentum toward its long-term vision of a private, resilient, and neutral Sovereign Rollup architecture.