In episode 13 of Exponential, Nexus founder and CEO Daniel Marin outlines near-term roadmap and long-term ambitions. With Testnet III reaching more than three million participants, Nexus is preparing for its most significant milestone yet: mainnet launch in Q1 2026.
That mainnet release will feature a production-ready instance of the Nexus EVM and compute network. While enshrined applications won’t ship at launch, the infrastructure will be in place for developers to begin building and deploying. “We’re seeking to go out to market as soon as possible,” Marin said, “so developers can start deploying applications, bringing liquidity and users.”
A core focus of the roadmap is enshrinement — embedding financial applications directly into the protocol as native components, rather than emulated contracts. “Enshrinement allows the protocol to be specifically optimized for that application," Daniel said. Enshrinement enables better performance and user experience, while offering shared primitives for developers building new products onchain.
While this model introduces more complexity at the base layer, Nexus addresses those tradeoffs through its compute network and general-purpose zkVM designed to generate proofs for full block execution.
“We want those blocks to be ZK-proven so that the state transitions are validated by pure math — as opposed to a small set of validators reaching consensus,” Daniel said.
Future versions of the Nexus zkVM will improve performance and move the network closer to real-time, verifiable block execution. “You can expect zkVM 4, zkVM 5, zkVM 6… until one day the network is able to prove Nexus blocks in real time,” Daniel said.
Looking further ahead, Daniel sees a broader industry shift toward tokenization, capital efficiency, and infrastructure maturity. In that context, Nexus is building toward a singular goal: becoming a base layer optimized for programmable, verifiable finance. “We want to give users maximum access to the new financial system,” he said, “and to the new technologies being developed.”
