Last Friday, at 9pm on the evening of December 6, a Nockchain node began mining.
It mined continuously for about 40 hours, without a hitch, until it stopped, as programmed, on Sunday afternoon.
The last remaining memory issues have been resolved.
Nockchain is now running as an internal devnet.
We have a transaction engine with an accompanying unit test suite.
We have a consensus engine that implements Nakamoto consensus using our ZKVM as the PoW puzzle.
We're very pleased to share that Nockchain is feature-complete and ready for additional internal testing.
Over the past several months, we have taken the NockApp framework from an idea to something we use every day. The choo command-line Hoon compiler is core to our development workflow. Nockchain itself is built on the NockApp framework. The Nockchain wallet has grown from a batch-mode terminal interface to a full TUI with support for incremental construction of transactions and airgapped hot/cold wallet separation.
To achieve this, we have spent significant engineering effort on the framework. NockApps support fully-asynchronous IO drivers which can leverage the entire ecosystem of Rust IO libraries, off-main-thread Nock execution, state migrations for Nock kernel upgrades, embedding Nock kernels in Rust executable files, and durable persistence of Nock kernel state across NockApp invocations.
We are continuing to improve the performance and robustness of Crown, the primary library for NockApps, and Sword, our Nock runtime.
As of today, we are also publishing an accessible, readable version of the Nockchain white paper in the form of a printed booklet.
We'll be gifting copies of the booklet this evening to guests of our launch party in Austin, TX.
Now, everyone wants to know:
When will you get the code required for mining? When can you begin mining? And where can you learn more, or connect with the team?
The present memo is our first official, public status update on the development of Nockchain, so we're now happy to answer these three questions.
We will release the source code shortly after the completion of our internal consensus testing.
We will then go live with a minimalist, bare-bones mainnet (which we call the "dumbnet") within a matter of weeks after publishing the source code. The dumbnet will not be a testnet, but a scope-minimized first version of our live, public mainnet.
Also as of today, we are officially opening the Nockchain community with two new places where developers, friends, and cultural entrepreneurs are welcome to interact with us and each other.
Developers will find the Nockchain technical forum at forum.nockchain.org and all interested parties are invited to find us in the new Nockchain Telegram group: t.me/nockchainproject.
