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Architecture Overview

The Nexus Layer 1 consists of three fundamental architectural layers:

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1. Execution Layer

The Execution Layer is a planetary-scale verifiable supercomputer.

It is the core part of blockchain architecture responsible for running transactions and smart contracts. As the “engine room” of our blockchain, it processes the logic of decentralized applications (dApps), updates account balances, and ensures all computations and state changes are valid and consistent across the network.

It is designed for horizontal scalability and ultra-high performance, as it was designed to onboard all of the world’s computational resources to the network and concentrate them into the Nexus Layer 1 to construct the Universal Proof.

Rooted in the principles of Incrementally Verifiable Computation (IVC), the Nexus Execution Layer allows anyone to perform computation anywhere, generate cryptographic proofs, and submit those proofs into a globally auditable system.

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A new compute paradigm: The IVC machine

Rather than simply executing code, the Execution Layer is a machine for proving computation. It’s defined by three core properties:

  • Incremental verifiability: Every step in a computation produces a succinct proof that can be verified independently and aggregated recursively.
  • Global parallelism: Computation is distributed across a dynamic, decentralized mesh of nodes — orchestrated through a DAG-style topology.
  • Recursive aggregation: Proofs are recursively folded into higher-order proofs, enabling scalable throughput with constant verification cost.

This is the IVC machine — a new class of compute infrastructure where proof is the product. Nexus is the first to bring it to Internet scale.

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Hierarchical architecture: Orchestration and delegation

To operationalize this system at scale, the Execution Layer introduces a layered architecture:

  • Delegators: Lightweight compute nodes. Any user running Nexus OS can contribute CPU cycles. These nodes execute tasks via zkVMs and emit zero-knowledge proofs.
  • Orchestrators: Coordinators that manage delegators, aggregate proofs, and maintain high-quality throughput. Currently centralized for speed, they will transition to a permissionless market over time.
  • Proof trees: The network forms a DAG where delegators feed into orchestrators, recursively combining local proofs into the Universal Proof — a single, succinct statement verifying global computation.

This structure enables Nexus to scale horizontally (more compute) and vertically (faster aggregation) — without sacrificing verifiability.

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From theory to deployment

Nexus isn’t just conceptual. Multiple public testnets have proven the viability of the Execution Layer:

  • Millions of nodes have participated globally via Nexus OS.
  • Full zkVM integration allows for arbitrary EVM-like workloads to be proven and verified.
  • Universal Proofs — verifying entire blocks of computation — are in active development, with the first milestone imminent.

The system is live, performant, and rapidly evolving.

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Why it matters

As AI models, rollups, and onchain infrastructure strain the limits of traditional blockchain compute, Nexus offers an alternative: trustless, scalable, verifiable execution.

Developers can:

  • Run untrusted computation with cryptographic confidence.
  • Delegate workloads to a global proving network.
  • Scale applications without compromising on transparency.

This is critical infrastructure for the Verifiable Internet. And it’s built on open math, open participation, and global collaboration.

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2. Consensus Layer

The Consensus Layer is a planetary-scale consensus supercomputer.

The Consensus Layer ensures all participants (or nodes) agree on the current state of the system. It consists of a network of independent actors which trust shared data without needing to trust each other by following internal consensus algorithms that ensure ordering. The Consensus Layer synchronizes and concentrates global transactions into the Universal Proof, establishing security, finality, and censorship resistance.

This layer is the cryptoeconomic substrate of Nexus — a capital-coordinated consensus supercomputer designed to finalize verifiable computation with maximal integrity, minimal latency, and planetary-scale resilience.

Its primary function is to ratify the Universal Proof: a succinct, recursive artifact attesting to the correctness of all computation performed on the Nexus Layer 1. For such a proof to carry epistemic and operational weight, it must be anchored in a tamper-resistant, economically secure global consensus.

Architecturally, the Consensus Layer operates as a multi-phase, modular protocol stack:

  • Early Phases: Tendermint-based consensus with delegated staking and single-ring validator topologies.
  • Mid Phases: Introduction of orchestrator and re-delegator roles, supporting nested security rings and capital layering.
  • Later Phases: Deployment of HotStuff-2 with epoch-based committee rotation, adaptive quorum selection, and probabilistic fork-choice rules — all designed to withstand long-duration adversarial coordination.

The long-term target is a globally distributed validator mesh exceeding ( 256^4 ) nodes, capable of maintaining liveness and finality under extreme network partitions or adversarial capital attacks. The economic security model scales asymptotically toward a $1 trillion staked threshold, aligning incentives through recursive delegation and consensus-weighted slashing.

Crucially, the Consensus Layer is not a passive state machine — it is an active verifier of universal computation, entangled with the Execution Layer through recursive proof ingestion and finality issuance. This fusion redefines consensus not as a ledger append-only operation, but as a verifiability oracle — enabling tamper-proof agreement over models, applications, and logic itself.

Participation is structurally inclusive. Stakeholders at every level — from retail delegators to orchestrator operators — are economically incentivized to reinforce systemic trust. This composable trust lattice transforms consensus from a security mechanism into a planetary-scale coordination primitive.

In a world where AI, sovereign rollups, and critical systems demand provable integrity, the Nexus Consensus Layer establishes a cryptographic root of trust — not just for blocks, but for the behavior of the machines that run our future.

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3. Storage Layer

The Storage Layer is a planetary-scale storage supercomputer.

The Nexus Storage Layer is currently under construction and will be built to scale with the needs of onchain AI and the broader Verifiable Internet.

Where the Nexus Execution Layer brings supercomputer-grade compute to blockchain infrastructure, and the Consensus Layer ensures planet-scale coordination, the Storage Layer will complete the triad: a sovereign, resilient, and radically more efficient substrate for storing and accessing data.

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How it works: Hyper-dimensional encoding and DAS

At the heart of the Storage Layer lies a novel approach to data encoding and retrieval:

  • Files structure enables distributed representation with strong cryptographic properties.
  • Only a small subset of this encoded data is stored across the network.
  • Retrieval involves sampling this subset and computationally decoding the file.

This system pairs with Data Availability Sampling (DAS), a technique originally developed in the Ethereum ecosystem, to allow light clients to probabilistically verify that all data is available without needing to download it in full.

Together, hyper-dimensional encoding and DAS turn storage into a verifiable, compute-intensive process — fitting for a world where compute is abundant and trust is scarce.

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The architecture: Scaling from Ethereum to a universal state

The Storage Layer will be deployed across three main phases:

Mainnet Season 1 – Replicated storage A familiar model where storage nodes replicate the entire L1 state, Ethereum-style. Simple and robust.

Mainnet Season 2 – Delegated staking Inspired by Lido, this phase introduces storage orchestrators who manage nodes and stake to guarantee liveness. Nexus OS users can contribute spare storage to the network.

Mainnet Season ∞ – Data availability sampling The final form. Storage becomes probabilistically sampled and externally accessible. Clients can request data directly, while the system retains resilience through redundancy and decentralized orchestration.

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A new kind of economic engine

With a target of $100B+ in storage-layer staking, this layer is designed to maximize indestructibility. Participants are incentivized not just to store data, but to secure its permanence and integrity over time.

As AI systems become more powerful and more foundational to society, they must become more verifiable. That means:

  • Training data that can be audited
  • Model checkpoints that can be proven
  • Inference outputs that are reproducible

All of this hinges on a storage system that’s radically more scalable, more trust-minimized, and more economically sustainable than anything that exists today.

In its final form, storing that same 10MB image onchain will cost $0.0000036 per year, with 1 billion node resilience.