In a recent interview with Digital Asset News, Nexus founder and CEO Daniel Marin explained how the Nexus is rethinking blockchain architecture to support a new class of decentralized applications, starting with finance.
“Nexus is an exchange layer one focused on the concept of verifiable finance,” Daniel said. “It gets more powerful the more people that join — which is a characteristic previously unseen in traditional blockchains.”
Unlike conventional blockchains that slow down as more nodes are added, Nexus uses a radically different model: general-purpose zero-knowledge proofs and GPU-powered proving networks that scale horizontally. The more compute you add, the faster and more efficient the system becomes.
This design, Daniel explained, originates from work begun at the Stanford Cryptography Lab, where he and several founding engineers started developing zk virtual machines as undergraduates. “Instead of relying on consensus, you compute a proof,” he said. “And the more GPUs you have, the faster you can compute them.”
That foundation enables Nexus to operate with an unusually high ceiling for performance. But throughput alone is not the point. Daniel was clear that infrastructure, while necessary, isn’t sufficient. “Just building a next-gen throughput and latency layer-1 engine isn’t enough,” he noted.
A core vision
“A core part of our vision is to enshrine native, revenue-generating applications at the layer-1 itself.” This is where the strategy becomes more distinct. At mainnet, Nexus will include a fully integrated exchange, with spot and perpetuals trading at up to 50x leverage. Unlike most general-purpose L1s, which rely on external apps for liquidity, Nexus builds trading functionality into the protocol itself.
There’s a broader rationale behind that choice. According to Daniel, enshrining the exchange directly in the protocol isn’t just about control — it enables new forms of developer composability and business design. That opens the door for third parties to launch their own trading markets, perps, and synthetic assets using Nexus as their foundation, similar to how Hyperliquid recently enabled external deployment of perpetual DEXs. These are powerful primitives that go well beyond simple DeFi templates.
The timing for this kind of infrastructure may be ideal. As financial institutions accelerate plans for tokenizing real-world assets, from treasuries to real estate, there’s rising demand for blockchains that offer not just security and scale, but economic fundamentals.
Everything is an asset
“Everything will be an asset. Everything will be traded. Everything will be liquid,” he said. “That’s the world we’re building for.” In that future, Nexus aims to be a default venue not just for developers, but for capital.
“The final product? A next-generation layer one featuring an enshrined exchange, allowing anyone to trade 24/7. Everything else is infrastructure to enhance that experience.”
Beyond that, the longer-term goal is to position Nexus as a verifiable operating layer for financial software of all kinds. That includes synthetic markets, AI compute, tokenized commodities, and decentralized prediction engines — all composed atop the same scalable, proof-driven base.
In Daniel’s words: “We think everything will become a market, and everything will be traded with leverage and through synthetic assets. Hence why this is the most important core engine of any blockchain to really, really nail down.”
