Written by: Luke Leasure & Nick Carpinito
Compiled by AididiaoJP, Foresight News
First, look at the macro picture: CPI remains moderate, and equities continue to outperform crypto.
On Wednesday, the CPI rose 0.1% month-over-month, in line with market expectations and a notable rebound from -0.4% the previous month. Housing accounted for about two-thirds of the increase, while energy continued to decline by 1.5%, with gasoline falling 2.9%. This data is unlikely to alter the Fed’s interest rate trajectory.
The stock market outperformed cryptocurrencies today: Nasdaq rose 0.56%, S&P 500 rose 0.23%, and crypto-related stocks gained 2.19%. BTC fell 0.25%, and most crypto indices performed even weaker—stocks continued to outperform tokens, remaining a recent ongoing trend.
ETF fund flows have shown a slight shift. A period of modest net inflows was interrupted by a single day of outflows, aligning with BTC’s weakening daily price action. However, since early July, net inflows have turned positive, contrasting sharply with the significant outflows seen in May and June. If this trend continues, renewed ETF accumulation could provide support for BTC.
Hash rate, pay twice
Make work do something useful, not just new ideas. Bitcoin miners burn computational power solely for hashing, with no other use; AI inference providers sell GPU time to customers without mining.
Tomorrow, at block height 126000, the Logos upgrade on Nockchain will go live, eliminating the boundary between the two.
Note: Nockchain is a Layer 1 public chain that launched fairly in May 2025 (no pre-mine, no VC allocation, no team reserve). Its core innovation is Zero-Knowledge Proof of Work (ZKPoW): miners no longer waste computational power on useless hashes like Bitcoin; instead, they generate zero-knowledge proofs (STARK proofs based on NockVM). Mining itself produces "useful work," securing the network while providing computing power for a verifiable computation market.
Dual Puzzle Mining: 30% to AI, 70% to ZK
In addition to its original ZK proof-of-work, Logos has introduced a second mining puzzle—integer matrix multiplication, the core operation behind AI reasoning—along with an independent difficulty target.
After activation, network block production is allocated 30% to AI puzzles and 70% to ZK-PoW. Miners perform matrix multiplication, and if the result meets the target, they win the block. If this computation is also being run for a paid inference client, the same computational power simultaneously becomes a ticket for the block reward lottery.
The Nockchain founder described this mechanism as a security budget that grows with the expansion of the AI economy: as demand for inference increases, more GPUs are directed to this chain, raising the cost of attacks.
But this logic relies on demand that has not yet been widely realized. Nockchain needs genuinely paying customers for inference to get the flywheel spinning.
To this end, the founder established another company, National Compute, specifically to serve as the first client. This company drafted the Logos proposal and completed the internal audit—in other words, the protocol’s largest upgrade and its first anchor client were both authored by the same party.
Launch timeline: Delayed three times
This launch coincides with the recent closure of Zorp, the research company behind Nockchain, which has transferred its trademarks and code repositories to Nock Community Co., a non-profit entity managing 20% of the protocol fund.
Logos is the first upgrade under the new governance structure: it underwent public testnet testing, third-party cryptographic audits, a maximum $1 million NOCK bug bounty, and an announced activation height. The dual-puzzle code ran on the public testnet for 20 days before being merged into mainnet this week.
Two things to be cautious about:
First, the activation height has been adjusted multiple times: initially set at 114,300 at the end of July, then changed to 122,000 after the testnet, and finally finalized at 126,000 on Friday. Any repeatedly delayed launch carries the same uncertainty.
Second, the security argument is built on a puzzle with no historical track record. Nockchain patched the reused-trail mining vulnerability at height 119400 via the Zoe upgrade in early August—reminding us that this proof mechanism is still in its early stages. Although that patch did not alter the ZK scheme but only addressed block reward capture, the AI puzzle itself raises questions about its soundness, which is precisely why audits and bounties exist.
Market valuation: $22 million; waiting for a market.
$NOCK is currently trading at approximately $0.009, with a market cap of around $22 million and a fully diluted valuation of approximately $41 million—far below the attention it received at its fair launch last spring.
For holders, the mechanism details on Friday are less important than one question: Can National Compute drive enough paid inference traffic to the miner clusters to turn the “security + revenue” narrative into actual cash flow?
Nockchain has already completed the more difficult engineering work. The market it truly needs, however, has yet to be built.