We’ve been building @Nockchain since 2023, launched $NOCK in mid-2025. Hard-capped supply, no pre-mine, Proof-based money. Programmability, Privacy, and Proof of Useful Work. All enabled by ZKPs.

Feel free to worry about whether we can execute on our vision. But you’re doing a great job of highlighting what @Nockchain’s vision is. By focusing on building up the foundation, a no pre-mine PoW chain that’s ZK-native, all of those features fall out naturally. $NOCK is compute-backed money. It will be programmable. It will be private. All of those are features that come from Proofs.

Is the $NOCK pivot in the room with us right now? This is a pre-launch talk I gave in 2023. Proof of Useful Work. Privacy. Programmability. All built on Zero Knowledge Proofs. That was @Nockchain at inception, and that’s @Nockchain now. I get that your fragile narrative needs some way to spin anyone else in the Proof of Useful Work space negatively, but there’s no need to lie or make things up. We have a different focus from your favorite bag, and have been aiming for Proof of Useful Work before anyone else. Multiple coins exist in the world, and that’s okay. youtu.be/TlZGbF8wr8o?si=CS5j…

Moneyness is an emergent property. Money is a Schelling point for value storage, exchange, and accounting. A system of coinage may achieve Moneyness if a growing network of people use it to store, exchange, and account for a stable or increasing amount of value over time. Storing value requires credible security. Exchanging value benefits from speed, ease, and flexibility. Accounting benefits from neutral immutability and lindyness. Digital money has some key benefits: neutral security can be proven, transfer can occur globally and quickly, and smart contracts can provide flexible, programmable constructs for interacting with value. Digital coins aiming at achieving Moneyness have converged to two primary shapes: - PoW, hard-capped supply coins with no pre-mine - PoS, pre-mined coins with flexible supply, inflation with burn mechanics to offset Moneyness is built up over time by a network of people using a coin; it isn’t achieved overnight. I strongly believe that PoW-shaped networks are the best candidates for global acceptance as Money. I began working on $NOCK back in 2023. I modeled the @Nockchain design after my good friend (Akis Kattis)’s 2020 research paper called Proof of Necessary Work, which imagined a PoUW network built on top of Zero Knowledge Proofs. Our team launched @Nockchain with no pre-mine in May of 2025, and we quickly became the largest ZK-proving network in the world (though the proofs being generated are not yet used by the network). We’re moving quickly toward privacy and programmability, all built on the same Proofs that secure the network. This summer we launched our AI Compute Network, which has 25 ExaMAC/s of compute and is presently merge-mining ~55% of Pearl blocks. We’re continuing research on making the AI Compute Network into useful verifiable inference. I’m happy to see more teams joining the Proof of Useful Work space. It’s good for the future of crypto for attention to be moving toward this important area of research. The question of Moneyness is a long game and will play out over time. Really, these economic experiments will be proven out through distribution over the course of years and decades.

I'd do a pod with @tulipking, happy to chat on the base:0x9b5e262cf9bb04869ab40b19af91d2dc85761722 thesis