My thanks to members of the Nexus team who reviewed this article for accuracy.

Scalability and Ease.

Mass adoption is all anyone in the blockchain space is talking about nowadays, and Nexus is no different.

In order to reach mass adoption, blockchains must be scalable. In order to reach mass adoption, they must be easy to develop on and to use.

These three features — scalability, ease of integration, and an intuitive user experience — are the “biggest challenges faced by the industry” according to the opening paragraph of Nexus’s Tritium Whitepaper, but while many other products believe that second-layer solutions are the answer, Nexus has been developing a scalable on-chain solution for years: the 3-Dimensional Chain (3DC).

An appendix in the original Nexus Whitepaper laid out a brief roadmap for all of the various components of the 3DC: three stages referred to as the TAO: Tritium, Amine, and Obsidian. Since then, the enthusiastic Nexus community has been waiting for technical details about the imminent Tritium release and beyond.

Lightpapers

I greatly appreciate entertaining stories, jokes, interesting tangents, and comics and other media in articles.

But Lightpapers aren’t about that. They’re for the devoted cryptocurrency enthusiast: semi-technical readers who want info about a project’s developments but don’t love reading through highly-technical PDFs day after day.

If that’s you, read on to see what Nexus’s new Tritium Whitepaper is about.

The Seven Layers of Nexus

Blockchain solutions with well-defined layers are believed to be more secure and scalable. Many projects are incorporating multiple layers, such as EOS (which separates authentication from execution) and Cardano (which separates computation from settlement).

Nexus defines seven layers that provide increasing degrees of abstraction.

What Is Abstraction? Why Do We Need It?

To understand why we need layers of abstraction, let’s take the computer or phone you’re reading this on as an example.

Your CPU is currently processing instructions composed in binary. Strings of 1s and 0s instruct it to do an incredibly long list of simple action items like reading memory and adding numbers together. Working in binary as a human would be immensely long, difficult, error-prone work, and assuming you’re reading this article as letters of the English alphabet, you’re not doing that.

Operating Systems provide a helpful level of abstraction — it’s easier for a human to talk to Windows, iOS, macOS, or Linux than to talk to your CPU directly, since the OS (Operating System) does a good deal of the heavy lifting, providing many useful tools. Operating Systems allow for more abstract actions, like managing files, processing input and generating output, opening connections to the Internet, and so on. Things that translate down to thousands and thousands of binary instructions for the CPU.

Yet that’s still far too much for your average computer user.

You’re not writing groups of programming instructions to your OS right now to get it to open a connection, access this article, and display it. No, a browser is doing that for you, at your direction.

Applications, like browsers, are yet another level of abstraction. As a trade-off, they have only limited possibilities — you can’t use GarageBand to analyze astronomical data — but applications are much easier and quicker to use since they are programmed with even more abstract actions like visiting, saving, or printing a website.

There are levels I’ve skipped for simplicity, and even partial levels along the way, but you get the point.

Interacting with a bit stream directly — inputting strings of 1s and 0s to your CPU to accomplish tasks of significance — would be impossible for humans.

Multiple levels of abstraction are necessary to create a reliable, usable system.

Nexus layers provide functionality all the way from the core Network protocol layer up, each layer more abstract than the last. Each layer features an appropriate security model to balance scalability, security, and ease of use.

Focus on Business Integration

The way forward for smart contract platforms — though Nexus contracts are called “advanced contracts” to prevent Nexus from being confused with Turing-complete smart contract platforms — is a focus on business. Until third-party organizations begin using platforms internally and building on them for public applications, “mass adoption” will continue to be a hope propped up only by hype. Business adoption is essential.

So the entire Nexus framework is designed with business integration in mind. APIs for smart contracts, a robust identity system, scalability innovations, and a template marketplace are all examples of this focus.

Over a year of research, Nexus created a system of seven layers which offers what the team believes is the best solution for security, scalability, and usability by developers. From the highest to lowest layers, these are:

Interface — where users interact with Nexus (wallet) Logical — where advanced contracts’ applications live API — where applications can interact with advanced contracts Operation — where basic operations are performed on registers using opcodes Register — where registers store state data for advanced contracts, and any other platform-based apps Ledger — where transactional data is stored and organized Network — how messages are sent among nodes

The Tritium Whitepaper dedicates a section to each of these layers, with multiple subsections enumerating each layer’s features, plus a final section on security considerations and appendices.

The bulk of the Nexus team’s labor so far has, necessarily, focused on the lower layers, so discussion of the later layers in the whitepaper become more future-oriented: “will be needed, will need to be decided,” etc. As the whitepaper says, “To lay the foundation for viable scaling solutions, certain aspects of the original Blockchain protocol need to be revisited.”

Of course, with each layer going up, the performance impacts of small improvements on underlying layers are compounded. This is why Nexus’s Lower Level components — streamlined foundations with fun acronyms like LLL (Lower Level Library), LLD (Lower Level Database), and LLC (Lower Level Cryptography) — are so important.

While other projects often have only minor differences — open source innovations are easy to copy across projects, after all — Nexus is something original. To my knowledge, no one else is building this kind of 3-dimensional chain.