June was a month of consolidation and construction. The largest task is still the second hard fork, with a sweeping locking and validation rework. It is being carved into smaller, reviewable chunks which land one at a time. Alongside that, the block explorer had its busiest month so far, smart-contract tooling was pushed to its limits with the Nexa Warriors contract suite, and time-lock vaults came within sight of completion.
All of these updates, with more detailed information, can be found below in the June monthly development update.
Preparing for the Hard Fork
With the second Nexa hard fork coming closer and closer, a lot of effort is going into the main protocol upgrade. The team spent the month extracting a locking and validation rework piece by piece. Seven separate merges landed as a result, most of them dedicated to stabilizing Tailstorm and its DAG-based consensus.
More changes:
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A 52-file extraction pulled the infrastructure work out of the rework wholesale: tighter locking around token-wallet operations, the removal of a redundant lock, improved logging, protection for the validation queues against being modified while in use, and a handful of small contained fixes.
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A follow-up constrains how the node picks the best chain tip.
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Another requires uncles to appear before summary blocks in a block’s miner data.
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Removed invalid subblocks along with their descendants and renumbered the remainder, since the DAG requires its sequence numbers to run in order.
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The lock-order hierarchy the node depends on was written down explicitly in the developer notes.
The cycle also welcomed a new core contributor, Steven van den Meiracker, who made his first appearance in the node repository fixing a networking issue at epoch boundaries.
Block Explorer
Nexa Explorer had one of the busiest months so far, with eleven separate changes landing on the main branch. The top highlight is that you can now run Nexa Explorer natively on your localhost with just a single command and a few requirements. Decentralization is a pivotal aspect of the blockchain, and now anyone can run their very own Nexa Explorer.
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The home page was rebuilt around a new Top NFTs panel beside Top Tokens, a compact total-value-locked summary with a soonest-unlocks view, and a mobile-friendly layout.
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The smallest per-NEX exchange values no longer round down to zero.
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A new token-authorities tab was added to the address and token pages.
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The HODL vaults page gained a stats header and a pair of charts, covering locked-versus-redeemable balances and unlocks over time.
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On phones, the transaction inputs-and-outputs view was rebuilt as tabbed cards at full desktop parity.
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The Nexa Fun tab was updated to add historical and fun events.
Also, documentation on how to run your Nexa Explorer was shipped, along with smaller and more technical changes, such as sessions being moved into a shared cache, the load balancer resolving web instances at runtime, and database migrations running once, up front.
NexScript Playground
Another update comes from the NexScript playground. A full code editor has been added, with five example contracts to help developers get started with coding advanced transactions. The playground is connected to the network, and you can write, test, and interact with the contracts straight from the website.
The new centerpiece is the Monaco editor, now upgraded to recognize NexScript. It highlights the language properly, including opcodes and script globals, and its autocomplete knows the difference between a base keyword and a member accessor, so it offers what actually applies where your cursor is. When a build fails, the lines at fault are highlighted for you. You can keep several contracts open in tabs, and the interface itself is tabbed too.
There are more upgrades to the playground:
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Browser alert boxes have been replaced with modals and toast notifications, and feedback appears inside the application.
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Bytecode and contract breakdown views were added, showing what the source compiled into.
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Artifact actions were moved into dropdown menus, keeping the available operations together in one place.
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Token support arrives with the fields already prefilled.
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A keyboard shortcut now triggers a build.
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Browser storage is scoped per network.
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The layout was rebuilt for both mobile and desktop.
Altogether, these updates are making the playground a very useful tool for every smart contract developer.
Nexa Warriors Development
Nexa Warriors development is continuing. The game is fully functioning and is now undergoing systematic review and optimization, with rounds of improvements and front-end polishing.
Two new versions of the two-player card-battle contract suite landed, thanks to David Thibodeau. Since Nexa Warriors is not a typical game but runs on the blockchain, some in-game functions and features require smart contracts. These contracts are signed once the game starts, and the PvP logic and rewards are based on them. Stakes are high: the winner of the battle earns a new card for their deck from their opponent, and the smart contracts enforce these rules.
Overall, the game is coming together well, and we will save more of the excitement for the launch date. While the date is not set yet, the community can be sure that the first card game on the Nexa blockchain is coming to life.
Wallets, SDKs and Time-Lock Vaults
Across the SDKs and wallet libraries, the Kotlin library gained an optional message prefix for CAPD sends, and a new release refreshed key derivation and unified all exceptions under a single type. The app-building library has a Jetpack Compose design system in review, close to twenty merges, spanning buttons, text fields, tabs, tables, charts, toasts, and navigation, plus a change moving session and identity challenges onto secure random generators. The script-machine library was updated for the SDK’s unified exceptions.
Time-lock vaults moved close to completion. These are non-interactive vaults that hold funds until a chosen time, gated by a time lock and a signature, with unlock support now extended from block heights to calendar timestamps. First deployed in the Otoplo wallet, the vaults are being brought upstream, and a fix prevents a single transaction from mixing height-locked and time-locked inputs. A single contract acts as a factory, deriving many independent vaults.
Ecosystem
One notable ecosystem update is the Bitcoin Unlimited website refresh, which brings a new design that gathers everything you need to know about the organization behind Nexa, its history, and its goals in one place.
Conclusion
A lot of work is happening behind the scenes. Some of it is finished but not yet merged: the time-lock vault and its specification, the app’s Compose design system, and a further stack of Tailstorm fixes are all in review. Much of this work is ongoing, and we will update the community in next month’s development update.
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