In this episode of Exponential, Wucklace, a self-taught developer and creator of Exhibition DeFi, shares his path from fashion design to building onchain — and why he’s working a new kind of platform on Nexus.

His journey started with crypto trading and quickly deepened. “I love the concept of total ownership,” he says, recalling his first experience with non-custodial wallets. “There is no restriction, no permission. I can do anything I like with the wallet. That got me curious.”

That curiosity led him to question the way token launches work today. “Once a token dies, the project barely lives,” he says. “I believe the issue is in the way we launch tokens."

His solution is Exhibition DeFi, a deterministic token launch platform built on Nexus. “If there is anything important, it must be defined before the launch,” he explains. That includes parameters like supply, liquidity, distribution, and funding targets — all enforced by the protocol.

For Wucklace, Nexus was the natural fit. “Nexus does not treat verifiability as an option,” he says. “It is built into the execution layer.” That alignment gave him the confidence to move beyond a demo and start building toward a production-ready protocol.

His advice to other developers is to resist hype and focus on what matters. “A developer should define the rules before anything else,” he says. “Do your work based on what we really need — what will bring the mass adoption we’re looking for.”

Looking ahead, he’s focused on refining Exhibition DeFi and prototyping additional utilities to help other builders with token distribution and onchain workflows.

In this episode of Exponential, Oliwer Nastaziak, chief growth officer at Fren.One, shares what it’s like to build and moderate internet-native communities — and why those communities matter more than ever.

Oliwer has been deep in the trenches of community operations for years, first as a Telegram moderator and now helping lead Fren.One, a firm he describes as “a community operating system.” The FriendOne team works to manage everything from real-time support to scam prevention, all while fostering long-term relationships and infrastructure.

In this episode of Exponential, Joseph Zhang, co-founder and CEO of CatchBack, explains how a side hustle flipping Pokémon cards evolved into a full-stack collectibles trading platform. Combining lessons from crypto infrastructure with firsthand experience in collectibles, CatchBack introduces a new model for how real-world assets can trade online.

“Crypto taught me about liquidity,” Joseph says. “In collectibles, things move slowly. Our goal was to bring the efficiency of crypto tooling to physical trading cards.”

In this episode of Exponential, Aisling Connolly, Chief Strategy Officer at TACEO, joins the show to unpack the deeper technical and philosophical motivations behind verifiable finance. With a background in mathematics, economics, and cryptography, Ais has long been drawn to using rigorous math to solve real-world problems — a mindset that eventually brought her from traditional payments to privacy infrastructure for blockchains.

“We’re building this network for private shared state,” Ais explains, referring to TACEO’s architectural vision. “How can we have it so that we have verifiability, composability, and privacy?” The company’s design leverages multiparty computation (MPC) alongside zero-knowledge proofs, enabling parties to compute on encrypted data while generating proofs of correctness — without exposing sensitive information.

Ais contrasts today’s onchain possibilities with the legacy systems she encountered in traditional finance. “In the TradTech world, you just had to trust the banks and the tech companies… because you only had to trust one or two people,” she explains. “With blockchain, you get verifiability without needing to trust anyone.”

But that shift also exposes a tradeoff: “You can go check your transactions, but you lose the privacy.” For Ais, this tension between trustlessness and discretion has been a through-line in her career: “I’ve always been focused on the same problem — how can we have verifiability, but with this layer of privacy?”

While privacy has historically been misunderstood or deprioritized, Ais sees the value proposition becoming clearer. “People already do make the choice — they use VPNs, encrypted messengers. And if I can use a privacy protocol that transfers in one second and costs half a cent, I’m not losing efficiency.”

She also points out that many legacy financial systems are held together by inertia, not performance. “If you factor in the real cost of running legacy financial systems — which are 30 years of things built on top of things — they’re not efficient. They’re crumbling.”

As new use cases emerge at the intersection verifiability and finance, Ais believes the infrastructure being built today will soon become the default. “Most people will be using verifiable finance,” she says. “Whether you know it or not.”

In a world where AI can generate realistic images in seconds, Faust founder and CEO, Kosuke July Hata, who goes by July, is building a new kind of camera — one that proves a photo was actually taken by a human, on a specific device, at a specific time and place.

Roc Camera is a compact, point-and-shoot–style device that embeds cryptographic proofs into every image it captures. “It’s a camera that takes verifiably real photos in the age of AI,” July says. “It can prove that the photo could have only been taken by this specific camera.”

The camera works by signing sensor data at capture time using a private key embedded in the hardware. These signatures are bundled with the photo to enable later verification. We've covered a similar topic during our episode on verifiable media, and have an earlier blog post that explains how verifiable media fits into the larger vision for verifiability.

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.”