In the latest episode of Nexus Chats, I sat down with our Head of Business Development Steve Yu to learn more about how the Nexus ecosystem is rapidly expanding — and why verifiability is at the heart of everything being built.
Steve’s journey to Nexus is anything but linear. After serving in the U.S. Marine Corps and working in luxury travel, he discovered the power of decentralized systems firsthand through M-Pesa during a trip to East Africa. That experience set him on a path through crypto infrastructure startups and ultimately to Nexus, where he now plays a pivotal role connecting ecosystem partners and accelerating adoption.
“We’re sitting at the intersection of verifiability, AI, and Web3 — building infrastructure for the machine economy,” Steve explained.
That infrastructure centers around the Nexus ZKVM, a high-performance virtual machine powered by distributed compute. The ecosystem now includes over 65 companies and projects — spanning domains like ZK, AI, privacy, and blockchain — all collaborating to make verifiable computation accessible and scalable.
“Our ecosystem includes over 65 partners — from hardware acceleration to DeFi protocols — all aligned around advancing verifiable computation.”
Steve highlighted some recent Testnet III milestones that were were enabled by ecosystem partners like StarkWare, Dynamic, and io.net, who provide everything from core prover infrastructure to seamless wallet onboarding.
But it’s what’s coming next that makes this moment especially compelling. Nexus recently launched a verifiable AI lab focused on creating transparent, auditable systems and empowering AI agents to operate autonomously. This work feeds directly into Nexus’s march toward mainnet.
“There aren’t many companies offering clarity around AI. That’s why we’re launching a dedicated chain for proving AI outputs and running inference efficiently,” Steve said.
From building infrastructure that spans compute, privacy, and AI to onboarding millions of users worldwide, Nexus is moving quickly — and deliberately — toward a future where trust in computation is no longer optional.
