The Crossroads of Freedom

Humanity stands at a crossroads. Throughout history, a struggle has persisted between those who seek control and those who cherish freedom. Technology has always been a catalyst in this struggle, shifting the balance of power in unpredictable ways. The internet, once heralded as a bastion of free expression and association, has increasingly become a tool for mass surveillance and control.

The ideological experiments of the 20th century demonstrated that political action alone is insufficient to secure lasting freedom. In response, the cypherpunk movement emerged, championing the creation of technologies that would make civil liberties inviolable by design. Their most influential creation, Bitcoin, laid the groundwork for a financial system independent of state power. However, the public nature of early blockchains exposed participants to scrutiny, and the original vision was slowly overshadowed by speculation and regulatory capture.

A new approach is needed. One that revives the cypherpunk ideal and provides the tools for a freer future. Such a future would be built on a foundation of voluntary associations and institutions that function with an emergent order, resistant to corruption and control. We call these network states.

In our view, blockchain technology represents the most effective way to build network states and similar sovereign applications. It has the power to redistribute control from unaccountable intermediaries back to individuals and to establish new, resilient structures of trust.

It was on this basis that Nomos was built.

Nomos: Blockchain Infrastructure for Network States

Nomos is a blockchain infrastructure designed for network states and other decentralised applications that demand the highest levels of privacy, neutrality, and resilience. Using Nomos, network states are implemented as lightweight blockchains known as Zones, with an underlying chain providing consensus, security, and interoperability. In essence, Nomos is designed to be a platform for true improvements over millennia-old cooperation techniques to proliferate and flourish.

In order to serve as an effective infrastructure layer for the applications that will define the next generation of social order, Nomos was designed with the following principles in mind:

Privacy: Nomos must protect information associated with all participants, regardless of their involvement in the network. On the infrastructure level, Nomos nodes must be confident that their block proposals cannot be traced. Nomos also provides developers with the tools to build applications with programmable privacy, allowing these applications to keep personal data hidden.
Neutrality: Activity on Nomos must be handled in a way that does not compromise the public neutrality of Nomos nodes. This way, nodes can participate in processing transactions without having to make their inclusion public. If a Nomos-native application attempts to censor a user by excluding their transactions, Nomos provides a fallback path to ensure that the transaction is included.
Resilience: Nomos must remain operational and protect privacy in the face of complex geopolitical scenarios, surviving challenges like a partitioned internet, heavy censorship, and hostile government action. To attract validators and reduce points of failure, running a Nomos node even on a laptop must be easy and straightforward. Scaling to accommodate as many nodes as possible is best accomplished with a consensus protocol that prioritises liveness, resulting in a network that continues operating even in the worst of conditions.

Use Cases

In its initial version, Nomos is intended to support Sovereign Rollups - the most customisable, performant solutions for network state applications built on Nomos. Sovereign Rollups have complete freedom to define their own state, only using Nomos to ensure consensus and the availability of rollup data. This design allows applications built on Sovereign Rollups to have low fees and maximum scalability. While Nomos is designed to eventually support permissionless and interoperable Zones with minimal setup required, this support remains a work in progress and is slated for inclusion in later versions of the protocol.

Sovereign Rollups can implement almost anything, ranging from applications to virtual machines that are home to many different applications. They are best suited for applications that require high performance and do not need strong interoperability. Some examples include:

Self-Sovereign Digital Nations/Communities: In its capacity as a blockchain infrastructure for network states, Nomos can power the core identity, communication, and governance layers for nascent digital nations. This would involve:
- Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) Solutions: Users can control their digital identities and share verifiable credentials privately and selectively.
- Secure Communication Channels: The Nomos ecosystem provides encrypted and censorship-resistant collaboration tools for citizens of network states. This would involve the related projects Waku for secure messaging and data transfer and Codex for decentralised data storage, both readily deployable by projects for their specific use cases.
- Decentralised Justice Systems: Building frameworks for dispute resolution and legal agreements within a network state, potentially leveraging zero-knowledge proofs for privacy.
Private DeFi Systems: With support for privacy built-in, Nomos could host DeFi protocols where transaction details, user balances, or trading strategies are kept confidential by default, only revealing necessary information to authorised parties. This is especially so when high volumes of transactions are expected by these applications. Examples may include:
- Private Exchanges: Trading platforms where order books or individual trades are obscured.
- Confidential Lending/Borrowing Protocols: Financial services where loan details or collateral information are private.
- Confidential Transfers: Securely sending and receiving digital assets with transaction details obscured using zero-knowledge proofs, ensuring financial privacy for individuals and businesses.
Gaming Applications: Games often rely on rapid state changes to function correctly, making them ideal for implementation as Sovereign Rollup applications on Nomos.