When bitcoin was launched, it launched with two major innovations: decentralized trustless money and also a mechanism that’s able to attract large amounts of compute.
Recently there’s been major strides in useful proof of work that have been gaining a lot of traction, notably:
PRL https://pearlresearch.ai/ found a way to do PoW by doing MatMul meaning PoW no longer compete with AI, their chain can be merge mined with useful proof of work AI data centres.
NOCK https://nockchain.org/ they made ZKPoW where miners generate zero knowledge stark proofs to secure the network, and the roadmap is for these proofs to verify arbitrary computation, you could use them to help neptune even. The end goal is for nockchain to be the chain that attracts large amounts of compute and verifies all the work for the world to use.
I actually believe NOCK to be a massive threat to neptune as it is basically the same thing as neptune, built using zk starks, programmable, scalable, private money for the world, except with the addition of UPoW which will act as a flywheel for it. Miners produce ZK proofs for all of humanity to use which helps the chain function.
I think UPoW is the last key missing piece for neptune’s roadmap that the team should strongly consider adding. The end goal of money was never just human → human transactions. Money is ultimately a coordination layer for resources, and compute is becoming the most important resource on earth. The chain that attracts the most compute becomes the marketplace for it wins. With your knowledge of ZK-Starks, you could build this.
I think tritonVM is a competitive product, Nockchain also has some issues during the launch with some people saying it wasn’t that fair. I think NPT being completely fairly launched can ultimately win if you take this approach.