Nexa: All you need to know

NexaCommunity

7 min readFeb 15, 2023

$Nexa is building a layer-1 ecosystem that can:

Provide instantaneous quick transactions suitable for P2P, P2B, and B2B transactions utilizing Bitcoin Unlimited’s 0-conf technology with double spend proofs, and instant finality through optional smart contract opt-in
Scale to global demand without compromising on decentralization with 100,000 to millions of TPS. Enabled by a revolutionary POW algorithm that removes the key bottlenecks to scalability: Signing of Signatures, and UTXO lookups. No longer will mining energy go to waste to merely order/provide consensus, mining energy on Nexa will allow the chain to scale, increasing speed, and reducing the data storage necessary of the blockchain
Provide a Wordpress like experience for token issuers with highly programmable native tokens and smart contracts on L1 without compromising on security. Enables practically everything possible on an EVM chain without the major scaling bottlenecks suffered by turing-complete networks.

Need to knows:

OG development team, Bitcoin Unlimited who are veteran blockchain architects and software developers who worked extensively with Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. Over 70 years of combined experience on the dev team
Launched Nexa to get away from politics, obstructionists, and maximalist resistance to improve the fundamentals behind Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash.
Bitcoin Unlimited is self-funded with dev team commitment and funding for at least 5 years.
100% Fair Launch, No ICO, No Premine, No VC’s, No organizational instamine through cloud infrastructure.
Community Project: Third Party Developers and Builders welcome, Community Funding Pools for special initiatives only. (Ie. Exchanges, Specific marketing, etc)

Skeptical about such bold claims? Read along, there is a lot to unpack! But first, a TLDR:

~70 million market-cap (as of 4/8/2023)
Proof of work
Mainnet Live since June 21st, 2022
~2T circulating / 21T total supply
Bitcoin halving tokenomics (~4 years to halving)
Listed on MEXC Global, Txbit, Tradeogre, SafeTrade, Exbitron, Xeggex, and Bimex
Community Raised $100k for MEXC Global Exchange
Development is self-funded through Bitcoin Unlimited

Last few years there has been no shortage of funding, use cases and ingenuity for building layer-1s. However, current platforms compromise on Decentralization (Proof-of-stake) Smartcontract security (EVM) User-experience (Multi-chain hassle/MEV) dApp composability (Sharding).

Nexa doesn’t compromise at all. It leverages a novel consensus algoritihm called NexScalePOW to scale. To put it simply:

The network scales as miners compete to optimize their hashing power through software optimization & hardware acceleration (FPGAs/ASICs & Cashdrives)

Here is co-founder Peter R. Rizun going in-depth on the math behind NexScalePOW, how it will utilize hardware acceleration and make Schnorr-signatures (a common UTXO bottleneck) scalable.

Graphene and X-Thin are technologies that efficiently transmit blocks. Allowing Nexa to dynamically scale blocks up to a gigabyte (gigablocks) without risk of miner centralization. This hyperscalable UTXO design is only bottlenecked by internet bandwidth of nodes & hardware. The final part of it is the UTXO lookup. This is also going to be put into the NexScalePOW soon. This will force miners to do very fast lookups across the whole UTXO database. Peter Rizun is already working on hardware to do this. See:

So what about these tokens and Defi? Even though the Ethereum & EVM ecoystem has trailblazed DeFi as we know it, it’s mostly been a vehicle for the speculation craze in governance tokens (with little to no utility) and shiny JPEGs. Ironically the two most succesful dApps Uniswap and Opensea do not require a governance token to function and captured the vast majority of the volume. What is the root cause of all these dApps not solving real world problems? I believe the root cause is Turing Complete VMs (Like EVM), which basically means: I can do any computation I want within a block. Initially this has been very useful in pushing DeFi to new heights, we owe innovative concepts like AMMs and DAOs to it. But they’re still primitive at best and ill fit for any kind of automation in the outside world. What is the root cause of the lackluster adoption?

As dApps advance in complexity, problems arise

Attack vectors for hackers and bugs increase, both require very expensive audits that slow down development.
Required blockspace increases, eventually throttling the blockchain, making transactions too expensive

Nexa aims to greatly simplify smart-contract deployment, while not compromising on complexity. It is using an upgraded version of Bitcoin script that is highly secure and efficient. It’s functions are decided top-down and go above and beyond what DeFi currently has to offer. By the end of May 2023, Nexa will offer: NexScript ,a tool simplifying smart contract creation on the Nexa network. With user-friendly interface, developers of all skill levels can easily create and launch projects. The aim is to make the platform accessible and user-friendly for all, attracting more businesses and driving its adoption and growth.

Native tokens and NFTs can serve a wide array of usecases such as:

Tickets
In-game Items
Supply Chain
Identity
Certifications
Collectables
Gift cards
Marketing
Stable Coins
Credits
ICOs
Loyalty Points
Community
DeFi Staking
Voting

Then there are even more complex use cases that are enabled on Nexa like: chain-issued stocks, options, bonds and DAOs with high degrees of programmability and security. NexScript could potentially bring highly efficient yet advanced DeFi without compromise.

In the current state, opcodes that enable these functions already exist on Nexa, but once NexScript’s high level programming language is implemented it will simplify development.

To illustrate how easy it will be to issue tokens, Here is a mockup of the upcoming minting service on Nexa:

In summary:

Nexa will be the most scalable chain on the planet due to it removing the key bottlenecks of scalability.

Key bottlenecks to allowing blockchain scaling on a PoW and UTXO-based network but they can be summarized as:

— Bandwidth: how much data can be sent between nodes.

— Speed: at validating transactions.

— Storage: space to store the blockchain.

Bandwidth Bandwidth has already been solved by B.U. using our graphene technology. It means that you basically only use a tiny amount of bandwidth to announce a block and therefore do not cause orphans as you increase the block size. So essentially all bandwidth becomes sending transactions between nodes. 100,000 tps is about 20MB/sec which is trivial on a business data connection. Bandwidth speeds are also increasing all the time exponentially. https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoin-unlimited-merges-graphene-block-propagation-technology/

Speed This can be split into a number of parts, but the three main functions that take the most time when validating transactions are SHA256 hashes, signature verification, and UTXO lookup. The first two are what the current NexScale POW fix. The NexScale POW forces miners to both SHA256 hash and do Schnorr sigs. Because mining is extremely competitive, over time whatever this algorithm does will be pushed into ever more fast and efficient hardware (i.e. FPGAs and eventually ASICs). This means that there will be commodity hardware created that can validate SHA256 hashes and Schnorr signatures at incredibly high speed and low electricity usage. See this video for more detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDRCWcw5sAU The final part of it is the UTXO lookup. This is also going to be put into the NexScalePOW soon. This will force miners to do very fast lookups across the whole UTXO database. Peter Rizun is already working on hardware to do this. See https://twitter.com/PeterRizun/status/1247554984968777729

Storage BU is working on a new UTXO commitment upgrade which will mean that miners will only ever need the UTXO set instead of the full blockchain. This will make joining the network much faster and the growth of the UTXO size should be linear (especially with UTXO consolidation incentives we are considering). Solid state storage is decreasing in cost exponentially. A 1TB a SSD has already reach a cost of ~$50. This is enough space for about 5 billion UTXOs. By the time we have really got global adoption that $50 of space will more likely be 50–100 billion UTXOs.

Nexa has the potential to fulfill the short-comings seen by Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other chains. All while remaining decentralized, proof of work (a commodity and not a security), open source, permissionless, and fair.