The team is accelerating, and the development news for July 2026 shows it. This month saw more than 100 merges from thirteen repositories across Nexa GitLab. The most important delivery is Tailstorm protocol hardening, which is still in the extensive testing phase. Tailstorm is reaching its final phases before the mainnet integration.
Continuous work is underway on the block explorer, Hodl vaults integration into LibNexaKotlin, and numerous updates to wallets and SDK infrastructure. NexScript playground is also moving towards planned updates and releases in the roadmap.
Notable developments are in the field of AI-assisted development, where the team is assembling skills and tools for AI agents. Previously, it was announced publicly that the work is ongoing, and we will soon review David Thibodeau’s presentation on AI skills.
There are a lot of other developments across the board in this month’s update. Read the full monthly development update below.
Preparing for the Hard-Fork
A lot of effort is going into the testing and hardening of the Tailstorm protocol. It is in very good condition; a major consensus upgrade is not something to be rushed, and we prefer a slow, steady path forward with no surprises. The huge 70-file draft was closed at the end of July, which included the last major updates. Most of it is reviewing and polishing the sub-block DAG.
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Reorgs are handled properly, and DAG data is rebuilt after a reorg finishes, using the new chain tip. The subblock cap per grove is enforced during reorg scoring and subblock selection.
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Blocks whose ancestor is unprocessed now are parked. Parked subblocks are reprocessed once a tip grove settles.
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Uncle subblocks are linked so that summary blocks referencing them can validate.
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Double spends hiding in unprocessed subblocks are caught during summary validation, and the winning transaction among conflicts is selected correctly.
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Reorg depth is bounded twice, by rolling checkpoints and block finalization at a default depth of 200 blocks, and by a maximum reorg depth at grove activation.
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Out-of-order epoch synchronization was fixed in a fifteen-file change that also set a two-hour limit on how far ahead of the clock a block may claim to be.
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Locking discipline tightened across the board. Validation threads are stopped before a DAG-initiated reorg.
Most of the preparation work for the second hard fork is now complete. All the updates are in Nexa GitLab, and the team is looking forward to one more node update to make a smooth transition from the traditional blockchain model to a Tailstorm-style DAG hybrid with sub-blocks.
Kudos to Steven van den Meiracker, who was introduced last month as a new core contributor and merged 15 changes this cycle, including the double-spend work.
Block Explorer
Five changes landed in a single sweep at the end of July.
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Testnet is unmistakably green. Whenever the node reports a chain other than mainnet, the page body, accents, tabs, buttons, and transaction pills all change color. The theme follows what the explorer is actually indexing.
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The front-page hashrate has gained a decimal place, and the weekly and monthly variations are calculated from raw numbers rather than the rounded values on screen.
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The Otoplo Hodl Vault is now simply the Hodl Vault, and a single contract can point to multiple apps. Otoplo and Wally are both listed against the vault template.
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Contributors get a development-only Docker setup that mounts the working copy into the containers, so template edits are live on refresh.
There are some items currently under review, including the chart library migration, a UTXO resilience metric, NFT processing fixes, and a mining pool tag.
Hodl Vaults
Users have been asking, and the team delivered. The Hodl Vaults were merged into LibNexaKotlin and published on 22 July 2026.
The Hodl Vault feature is built on Nexa’s Pay-to-Template scripting, and a single contract acts as a factory independently deriving vaults. Each vault is locked until a user’s selected block height or a date. Currently, vaults are available in the development library.
AI Skills
One of the more significant and new developments across the Nexa ecosystem is upcoming support for AI-assisted development. The Nexa AI skills repository went public on 11 August 2026 with seventeen Nexa skills. All of these skills are unique to the Nexa blockchain and teach AI agents how to interact, write code, and write smart contracts, as well as provide specifications for agents. Skills are also vendored into the Kotlin library, and with AI-assisted development, or “Vibe” coding, getting more popular, it will provide significant value to ecosystem developers.
While the major work and skills themselves live in the public repos, they are not yet presented to the community. Appreciation for the development goes to David Thibodeau, and we are as excited as you are about how it will unfold.
Wallets, SDKs and the Design System
One of the big wins in LibNexaApp is a multiplatform UI kit and the app-building library. A Compose design system from two building blocks was reworked into a nineteen-component kit. It covers buttons, text fields, tabs, bottom sheets, navigation, a searchable data table, toasts, and a chart component with line, bar, pie, and candlestick modes. One shared design scheme unifies colors and sizing, with themes for light and dark modes. The released branch got security work: moving session IDs and identity challenges to secure random generation, adding session expiration, and public key recovery from the signed message during login.
Elsewhere in the SDKs, the Kotlin library shipped three releases, one of them purely to re-sign macOS binaries that had gone out with a stale code signature. The RPC library broke a two-month silence with around eighty missing node bindings in a single merge, covering wallet operations, raw transactions, and chain queries.
Conclusion
Plenty of developments are finished but not released yet. The design system is waiting on a development branch to be promoted, the explorer has five reviewed changes queued, and the next wave of Tailstorm correctness fixes is already open for review, with the draft closed and the fork documented in both prose and specification.
It is worth noting that major work such as the hardware acceleration project Blitz is not included in the monthly development updates. This is not because it is not being developed or moving forward, but because the repository is still private and the major work is being done privately before a major release.
If you have any questions, feedback, or suggestions, join our community forum, channels, and chat groups, and feel free to ask.
You can find all the developments in detail on Nexa GitLab:
https://gitlab.com/nexa