Nock Exchange is a cryptotrading OTC marketplace for NOCK cryptocoin. It allows user to effortlessly sell their NOCK or place a buy order with a single click. The project was built for my freelance client in mid-2025.

Design

The website was designed to be accessible for people with any background in crypto and finance management. It's simple design allows anyone to publish an order. Registration does not require KYC procedures, so a visitor can start trading assets right away.

The visual design is minimalistic and clean, powered by shadcn/ui components and Bits UI library. Theme colors are almost sterile, chosen to emphasize cleanliness and simplicity while hinting at Nock coin's brand colors. I really liked the "Dashboard-01" template from shadcn/ui as a starting point for the design.

Security

Nock.trade was built with security in mind. One of the hardest challenges I faced with frontend was to ensure that it fully works with JavaScript disabled. This was possible thanks to SvelteKit's progressive enhancement, its philosophy of relying on native HTML features first, and my background in building server-side rendered applications.

I learned a lot about Linux, system-level security, authorization, permissions, ownership, unix sockets, firewalls while securing the backend. I set up a staging environment to implement blue-green deployments, ensuring zero downtime during updates.

I implemented fail2ban in combination with Cloudflare WAF for rate limiting and brute-force protection. Highly sensitive data is encrypted and securely stored separately. 3-2-1 backup strategy is implemented, automated and all backups are encrypted as well. I made sure to never log IP addresses and we made a choice to use privacy-focused metrics instead of Google Analytics.

Backend

Most of the backend is built with TypeScript running on Bun. The only part that I couldn't implement was Rust REST API for interacting with the Nock daemon. It was outsourced to a trusted developer who now maintains everything related to the Nock coin core.

One of the hardest challenges I faced was to create a signed network (signet) for Bitcoin. I spent about 30 hours researching, experimenting with deployment, modifying BTCPay Server, NBXPlorer, NBitcoin and wrote a detailed guide on how to set it up in my blog: How to add custom bitcoin signet to NBitcoin and NBXplorer.

I also created a custom web-based Nock GUI wallet frontend for our production and staging wallets for easier testing and funds management. I deployed two instances of RabbitMQ with custom rules, services, exchanges, queues

Reception

The project was successfully launched on August 29, 2025. It was met with positive feedback, especially regarding its user-friendly interface and clean design. Some people expressed concerns about liquidity and pointed to another exchange listing Nock coin that added it a few weeks earlier.

As of September 2025, the exchange owner made a decision to wait with marketing efforts until Nockchain implements its own atomic swap protocol. After that, the plan is to transition to a fully decentralized exchange (DEX) without holding custody of traders funds.