PoW this thing I thought had been buried by the narrative. Since Ethereum switched to PoS, talking about "mining" in the circle seems to carry a bit of political incorrectness. As a result, Nockchain @nockchain directly stepped forward and said: Sorry, we not only want PoW but also want to integrate it with ZK proofs.

This move is quite punk. They call it "Zero-Knowledge Work Proof" (ZKPoW), where miners don't perform traditional hashing but instead compute zero-knowledge proofs—each block produced is itself a valid computation. It sounds a bit like turning mining from a "meaningless hash race" into "useful work."

The underlying technology uses the Nock virtual machine, a minimalist combinator architecture, said to be especially suitable for running ZK circuits. I won't go into technical details here; they've published several papers, which are quite academic in flavor.

$NOCK tokens were fairly launched in May this year, with no pre-mining—something quite rare in the current environment flooded with VC tokens. The project raised $5 million, led by Delphi Digital, with Portal Ventures and Breed VC following.

It told a new story about PoW: proof of work doesn't have to be wasteful; it can "prove useful work."