This edition of the Nexus Changelog marks a major milestone for the Node Runners community. The Node Runners Reward Shop is now live — introducing a new system for earning and minting rare digital artifacts based on your proving contributions. At the protocol level, Nexus has unlocked new proving difficulty tiers that dramatically boost the network’s throughput ceiling, now exceeding 300 million operations per second. And across the CLI, OS, and zkVM, performance enhancements continue to push the boundaries of verifiable compute.
Whether you’re hunting rare Glyphs, optimizing your prover, or just getting started with quests, this cycle brings more ways to contribute — and more ways to be rewarded.
Node Runners: Reward shop and Glyph NFTs
The Reward Shop is now open for all Node Runners. Here, you can mint unique Glyph NFTs that record your contributions to the network. Glyphs are priced by rarity and can be claimed weekly — but Genesis Glyphs, which indicate when you joined Node Runners, are time-limited. Once a Genesis Glyph disappears, it’s gone for good.
To earn points and unlock access to Glyph drops:
Complete weekly quests posted through Node Runners Quests
Secure your Genesis Glyph and build your digital legacy
Redeem points as NEX Testnet III Points or spendable Node Runner credits
This system introduces a new layer of identity, status, and strategy for active contributors.
Read the full Node Runners blog post for more details and tips →
A protocol upgrade has expanded the upper bound of proving task difficulty, now enabling up to 1,600 proofs per assignment. This gives high-performing nodes the opportunity to earn more points in fewer steps — especially when auto-promoted to harder tasks.
As more nodes begin to auto-request these higher difficulty levels, overall network throughput has increased from 200 million to 300 million operations per second, marking a major leap in system capacity and efficiency.
Nexus CLI — Smarter, faster proving
The latest CLI updates unlock new performance tiers and give provers more control over how they scale.
What’s new:
Parallel proving: Use the --max-threads flag to request multi-threaded task execution (e.g., --max-threads 8)
Native builds: Local builds now enable CPU-specific optimizations by default when run via cargo run --release start, unlocking better performance than precompiled versions
Nightly toolchain support: Adding +nightly to your build may yield further performance gains
Manual difficulty control: Use --max-difficulty to cap your proving tier based on system capacity. Note: tasks must still complete within the 20-minute deadline to receive credit
These upgrades help CLI provers scale alongside the network — or tune their setup to fit specific hardware constraints.
Nexus OS — Quests and rewards go live
The Nexus OS frontend now reflects the evolution of the Node Runners economy.
Node Runners Reward Shop is fully integrated and accessible through Nexus OS
Fresh weekly Quests are now live, offering structured missions to earn points, prove tasks, and unlock new rewards
These updates make proving more engaging and accessible — especially for newcomers entering the ecosystem via the OS.
zkVM — Continued architecture refinement
The zkVM team has also made incremental reliability improvements across the VM core and tooling — with a focus on modularity, correctness, and long-term scalability.
Looking ahead
From protocol upgrades to user-facing rewards, this cycle represents the maturing of the Nexus proving ecosystem. With new ways to contribute, more meaningful incentives, and an expanding network capacity, we’re entering the next phase of scalable, verifiable compute.
Stay involved by exploringNexus Docs, contributing on GitHub, or proving your way to the next Glyph drop.
Ryan Crowe
