Since the inception of cryptocurrencies, there has been significant interest and hype around this technology. Each attempt at adoption ended in major scalability bottlenecks, ever-increasing fees, and ultimately political discussions. So far, the potential of cryptocurrencies has not been realized. The backbone of the internet, removing the middlemen and serving as programmable digital cash. All of this was envisioned by Satoshi Nakamoto; however, unfortunately, it never happened. However, all of this is absolutely possible. Since then, technology has evolved, and the only bottleneck is political debates and actual adoption. Let’s review the money of the internet from Nexa’s perspective and delve deeper into what cryptocurrencies were originally designed for.
Bottlenecks and Use Cases
Since the 2009-2013 era, a lot has changed. The vision of digital cash ultimately stagnated, and digital gold was consumed by political debates and non-technical speculative visions. Back in the day, there were attempts at real adoption that hit the roof due to technological bottlenecks and software limits. One of these was the block size limit, widely debated during 2015-2017. The initial block size limit was effectively capped by a 32MB P2P message size limit; however, due to fears of early DoS attacks, a consensus 1MB block size limit was added. The intention was never to keep it there, but to increase with ongoing updates once the network scales. That never happened.
Simply following Nakamoto’s original vision, it is possible to fully scale the network, keep fees low, ensure miners earn sufficient income, and maintain network security over the long term. The original intent was to use the blockchain as the backbone of the internet for many use cases. Money, transactions, and micro-transactions are only the main use cases, followed by many more. Verifiable identity, programmability, and proven global records create more innovations. Decentralized exchanges, tokens, on-chain real-world assets, and other follow-ups are great examples of what blockchain technology is capable of.
The Backbone of the Internet
At Nexa, the Bitcoin Unlimited organization and the Nexa team share the same original vision: decentralized, peer-to-peer money for the planet Earth. To unlock its potential, many technology bottlenecks were removed, and the blockchain scalability trilemma was rendered nonexistent, demonstrating the UTXO model’s potential. Hardware acceleration is a future-proof solution for scalability; NexScript is a native Nexa programming language that enables on-chain smart contracts. The main layer improvements will move the traditional blockchain model to a DAG hybrid that leverages both worlds, and forward-looking development efforts are underway to address quantum-resistance needs.
Microtransactions and Payments
The evolution of money is finally getting into good shape. Designed for extraordinarily high throughput, Nexa unlocks the whole set of possible use cases. One of the main uses is serving as a backend protocol for online peer-to-peer services, thanks to its high scalability, speed, low cost, and fully parallelizable architecture. Micro-transactions for pay-per-request or per-demand services completely remove the middlemen, extra fees, and the dependency layer. Now, everyone can participate in the global digital economy without permission from a third party.
However, the potential of microtransactions and cryptocurrency payments still remains largely unexplored. The internet’s infrastructure is still running on old rails. Every attempt at main layer adoption ended in higher fees and usability problems, and it never migrated to serve its intended purpose.
Before, it was not possible to send a $0.10 transaction without a third party. Today, it is completely possible, and not only that. It is possible to integrate these micro-payments into web services, digital marketplaces, and escrow smart contracts, and provide on-demand services without anyone controlling, watching, or limiting your actions. It may not seem like much, but it unlocks completely different interactions, and a new set of services is yet to emerge.
Services and AI Agents
Agentic services and AI are the latest trends and narratives, creating a lot of discussions and questions. The potential is truly there, and yet this is another use case to provide identity, enable agents to transact, and transfer value online. Emerging agentic use cases will create even more demand for electronic money, micro-transactions, and digital reputation with provable identity.
Online services often require high throughput and low fees. Many web-based services require payments and use a middle layer to process payments. They are limited, centralized, and dependent on third parties. Often have high and unnecessary service fees. Nexa perfectly fits the use case, providing an open, decentralized blockchain without permission, centralized infrastructure, or high fees. Native tokens and smart contracts unlock all possibilities while staying with Nakamoto consensus on layer-1.
AI agents are yet another rapidly emerging innovation that requires a deterministic, fast, and high-throughput layer to transact value, provide and receive services, and participate in the new emerging digital economy. Despite being early, cryptocurrencies are a perfect match for this emerging sector of agentic services. Nexa is looking forward to meeting the ever-increasing demand for a high-scalability blockchain to serve as the backbone of all online services, including, but not limited to, agentic ones.
Conclusion
Both new and existing use cases require exceptionally high throughput and speed. The new digital-era economy requires a more sophisticated blockchain than currently exists among the leading layers. Nexa is finalizing Nakamoto’s original intentions and is scaling the network in the most sophisticated way possible. Added programmability, removed bottlenecks, and addressed future-proof needs make it the perfect blockchain to become the money of the internet.