In Episode 16 of Exponential, Alec James from the Nexus product team introduces a major new release: the Nexus DEX Alpha, a core protocol component designed to deliver deep liquidity and high-performance trading from the ground up.

The Nexus DEX Alpha is the testnet version of a product that will operate as an enshrined order book exchange built directly into the layer one. This architectural choice gives it meaningful advantages in performance, composability, and developer experience. “It is part of the layer one itself,” Alec explains. “Anyone who comes to build assets or protocols on top of Nexus will benefit immediately from a highly efficient exchange with deep liquidity.” 

The DEX Alpha is being released in an early, community-focused phase.  The goal is to collect feedback, stress test performance, and bring early builders into the ecosystem. “We’re looking for high-quality first users,” Alec adds. “We’re not necessarily looking for people who will farm this and move on to the next thing.” 

The DEX also represents a philosophical shift. While most blockchains avoid protocol-level applications in the name of neutrality, Nexus takes a more opinionated approach. “If you want to have a high-performance financial layer, there are some primitives that should be native,” Alec says. By enshrining these functions, Nexus removes friction for developers and accelerates time to market for new financial products.

More at nexus.xyz/trade.

In this episode of Exponential, Dylan Kawalec, Head of Developer Relations at Phala Network, breaks down how Phala is building verifiable compute infrastructure using trusted hardware and open-source tooling. 

The goal: privacy-preserving execution environments that don’t rely on centralized cloud services or blind trust.

In the episode, we mention a podcast that Dylan recorded with Nexus Chief Scientist Jens Groth. Here is the link to that show.

More details about this episode are at blog.nexus.xyz.

In this episode of Exponential, Genzio Media co-founder and CEO Zack shares his perspective on the maturing Web3 landscape — and why the next wave will look very different from the last.

A crypto native since 2011, Zack launched Genzio in 2022 to fill a gap he encountered firsthand while working at Ripple and OKX: Web3 companies needed partners who actually understood crypto. 

Genzio now serves dozens of projects, offering growth, content, and community strategy — and giving Zack a panoramic view of the evolving market.

Right now, he sees three themes dominating the space: tokenized real-world assets, AI, and stablecoins. “The companies that are in Web3, such as Nexus, who are implementing AI, I think are going to be the winners of this next cycle,” Zack said. He also pointed to the rising global utility of stablecoins. “At the airport in Bolivia, a lot of goods are actually denominated in USDT. That’s a game changer.”

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.

For Dynamic co-founder and CEO Itai Turbahn, the future of crypto is in infrastructure. His company, Dynamic, builds wallet tooling designed to disappear behind the apps we already use. In this episode of Exponential, Itai lays out a compelling thesis: the next wave of crypto adoption won’t look like crypto at all.

“The next billion users are already here. We’re not bringing them to crypto — we’re bringing crypto to them.”

More episode info is here: https://blog.nexus.xyz/exponential-episode-12/.

In a digital world saturated with manipulated media and synthetic imagery, trust is no longer a given. Photojournalist David Butow has spent his career documenting real events — from the war in Iraq to protests in Washington — and he’s now at the forefront of a growing movement: making digital images verifiable at the source.

In episode 11 of Exponential, we explore the promise and friction of C2PA, an emerging standard for content provenance that embeds cryptographic proof directly into digital files.

In Episode 10 of Exponential, AI Seer founder and CEO Dennis Yap and AI Seer CTO Shahruj Rashid join to discuss their mission: building AI systems that can detect and dismantle misinformation at internet scale.

You can find more info about this podcast on blog.nexus.xyz/podcast.

In Episode 9 of Exponential, Jim Nasr, CEO of Acoer, joins us to tackle one of the most broken but vital systems in modern life: healthcare data. His story starts where many do — with a personal experience that revealed just how fragmented and opaque medical data really is. But unlike most, he decided to build something better.

Acoer is a software company rethinking health infrastructure from the ground up, using cryptography, blockchain, and user-centric design to make data more connected, more trustworthy, and more usable.

Find out more about this episode at blog.nexus.xyz

In a space that moves at the speed of Twitter and trades on memes, launching a print magazine about crypto feels almost radical. But for veteran journalists Zack Seward and Joon Ian Wong, that’s exactly the point. Their new project, Use Case, is a quarterly publication designed to document the parts of crypto that actually matter — the systems that work, the ideas that endure, and the people building things with real-world impact. 

“Crypto to me is wonderfully ambivalent,” Zack says. “There’s a lot of contradiction. That’s where the most interesting stories live.”

Born from a conversation on a boat in Bangkok, Use Case aims to be what the industry lacks: a thoughtful, credible artifact that treats crypto not as hype or headline fodder, but as a serious cultural and technological shift. 

With contributors ranging from essayists to illustrators, the first issue blends deep reporting with original art and longform storytelling. 

In Episode 7 of Exponential, Grigore Roșu — professor, computer scientist, and founder of Pi Squared — joins the show to explore a bold thesis: blockchains as we know them are only a first step.

The future of web3, Grigore argues, lies in universal computation, massively parallel verification, and an evolution beyond the bottlenecks of ordered chains.

Pi Squared, a Nexus partner, is building toward that future. With its FastSet protocol and a new approach to trust, the company is rethinking how verifiability and decentralization scale — while keeping verifiability at the core.