Owner: @Álvaro Castro-Castilla @Daniel Kashepava
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The information here is up-to-date, but note that the whitepaper is still in active development.
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Once again, the world stands at a crossroads. For as long as humanity has lived together, there have been individuals seeking to control others, and individuals seeking freedom from that control. As history marched onward, technologies emerged that shifted this struggle toward one side or the other. From writing, to gunpowder, to the printing press, to the revolver – inventions would periodically arise and upset the balance of forces in unpredictable ways. In recent times, the internet – initially hailed as a bastion for free speech and free association – has become a tool for mass surveillance and control.
The ideological experiments of the 19th and 20th centuries have made it clear that political action alone will not bring lasting freedoms to the human race. Recognising this, the cypherpunk movement sought to proactively create technologies to ensure that civil liberties become inviolable by design. Among their most influential creations was Bitcoin which, along with the blockchain protocols it inspired, built the foundation for a financial system independent from state power and elite control. However, as the public nature of these blockchains exposed their participants to government scrutiny and regulation, that original vision was gradually replaced with arcane financial instruments and predatory speculation.
The Logos movement was founded as a revival of the cypherpunk ideal that has been all but forgotten over the past several decades. Logos has dedicated itself to the creation of decentralised technologies that would enable people to engage in social collaboration on their own terms – without being worried about censorship or coercion. These voluntary associations and institutions that function with an emergent order and are resistant to corruption are referred to as network states, in contrast to traditional states that rely on threats of violence to maintain control. Only with a technology stack that facilitates private and permissionless consensus, data storage, and communication can this vision be made a reality.
Nomos was created by Logos to be the infrastructure facilitating the creation of network states and enabling people to easily interact with them. Using Nomos, network states are implemented as lightweight blockchains known as Zones, with an underlying chain providing consensus, security, and interoperability. Importantly, network states implemented on Nomos allow for social order to emerge and govern their operations, all while preserving critical properties that guarantee individual freedoms for all participants. These include privacy for users and infrastructure providers, censorship resistance, resilience against attacks, and credible neutrality. In essence, Nomos is the platform that will produce the conditions for true improvements over millennia-old cooperation techniques based on trust and control.
The world stands at a crossroads. The greatest minds of this generation are working tirelessly to build the technology that will determine the future of civil rights for centuries to come – both on the side of coercion, and on the side of freedom. Your decisions now will determine which side emerges victorious.
Nomos is a blockchain infrastructure designed for network states and other decentralised applications that require high levels of privacy, decentralisation, and resilience. It facilitates the creation and operation of these applications, provides a common context for their interaction, and gives users the ability to freely use any application they desire. Despite the diverse variety of apps that can be built on Nomos, it provides guarantees that they will operate correctly, securely, and without corruption. To accomplish this, Nomos is implemented as two blockchain layers. Applications can be implemented as lightweight, permissionless blockchains known as Zones, which are built on top of a solid Layer 1 foundation known as Bedrock. Nomos’ Bedrock together with its Zones is known as the Nomos Network. The entire Nomos architecture can be visualised as in the diagram in Figure 1.
Figure 1. The Nomos architecture diagram.
Bedrock is the foundational layer of Nomos, which provides consensus and lightweight verification to Nomos Zones. This consensus mechanism provides privacy for block proposers and is highly scalable, resilient, and supports dynamic participation by Nomos nodes. It also verifies proofs sent to it by Zones to ensure their correct operation. Bedrock is a decentralised network in which anyone can easily participate, where serving as a validator should ideally be as simple as running the Nomos Node application on a laptop. Validators contribute to the security, consensus, and interoperability of the Nomos Network.
The basic functionality of Bedrock is expanded and improved by a variety of Nomos Bedrock Services. Bedrock uses these Services to provide data scalability, network-level privacy for consensus, and executors that maintain Zone liveness by updating their ledger and state. While these Services are important for ensuring that Nomos can operate under the most adversarial conditions, Nomos' Bedrock can still operate without them. This may occur under adversarial conditions, or if a Service fails for some other reason. Validators who choose to participate in providing any number of Bedrock Services are expected to have increased hardware requirements compared to the minimal ones necessary for Bedrock validation.
Bedrock and Bedrock Services are used to create very lightweight and interoperable blockchains for applications known as Nomos Zones. Users have two options for interacting with these applications:
Nomos is primarily designed for applications on Zones, which together form the Native Execution Space. Zones rely on Bedrock to the fullest extent, thereby benefiting from the collective security of the entire Nomos Network. From a user’s perspective, Zones are deeply interconnected environments that require minimal setup and maintenance, as a result of their common structure and strong interoperability. They are also totally permissionless, with any Nomos validator - or user, if no validators are available - having the ability to keep a Zone live by serving as its executor. Despite this, Zones are resistant to censorship due to specific mechanisms guaranteeing transaction inclusion. This also means that users of a Zone will always have the option to exit that Zone if they so desire.
Despite the advantages of Zones, they are not suitable for all applications and remain a work in progress. Therefore, Nomos also provides support and unique features for Sovereign Rollups. These rollups are fully independent, without any constraints on their state imposed by Bedrock. This sovereign model provides greater freedom and customisability in creating a chain, allowing creators to maximise properties like performance. To achieve this, Sovereign Rollups must sacrifice native features such as the interoperability available between Zones as well as their censorship resistance guarantees.
The Nomos Network described above is designed to be resilient against a variety of adversaries while remaining decentralised and permissionless. In order to mount a defense against threats, Nomos relies on a three-tiered strategy to ensure the longevity and resilience of its applications. Given that an application on Nomos is implemented as a Zone or a set of Zones, each layer of the Nomos architecture will contribute to safeguarding its survival and correct operation. Whenever one layer fails and the defence strategy proceeds to the next stage, there is greater decentralisation and less concentrated trust assumptions to prevent further failure. At the same time, these secondary layers come with tradeoffs on properties such as latency and user experience, which is why they are only used as a last resort. The three lines of defence are: