For the past few months, I’ve been working on a new Layer 1 blockchain designed to solve what I see as the fundamental trilemma in the space: achieving strong privacy, infinite scalability, and post-quantum security simultaneously.
The result is NERV: a private-by-default, horizontally scalable blockchain that replaces Merkle trees with 512-byte neural state embeddings, proven inside Halo2 circuits and attested in hardware enclaves.
Neural State Embeddings Instead of Merkle trees, the entire state of a shard is compressed into a 512-byte vector using a transformer encoder. Transfers are homomorphic updates in this space—no decompression needed. This reduces inclusion proofs by ~900× compared to zkEVMs. Blind Validation & TEE-Bound Privacy Transactions are routed through a 5-hop onion mixer running inside remotely attested enclaves (SGX/SEV/TrustZone). No addresses, amounts, or metadata are ever visible on-chain. Dynamic Neural Sharding Shards split and merge autonomously based on an LSTM load predictor, updated via federated learning. This allows >1M sustained TPS with no theoretical ceiling. AI-Native Consensus Validators predict the next embedding hash using a distilled transformer. Disagreements are resolved via Monte Carlo simulations in TEEs, achieving sub-second finality. Useful-Work Economy Nodes earn tokens by contributing gradients to improve the network’s own encoder via differentially private federated learning—replacing PoW/PoS with useful computation. Why this might be interesting to HN: The system is fully open-source (MIT/Apache 2.0), with all code, circuits, and tests already public. No pre-mine, no VC allocation, no foundation treasury. Fair launch is scheduled for October 2027. Built with post-quantum primitives from genesis (Dilithium-3, ML-KEM, SPHINCS+). Implements formal privacy guarantees (ProVerif models included). The core ZK circuit (LatentLedger) is ~7.9M constraints—far smaller than equivalent zkEVM proofs.
Current status: ~85-90% of the code is complete, including core circuits, TEE attestation pipelines, sharding simulations, and federated learning incentives. Testnet is targeted for Q4 2026. I’m sharing this here not to promote a token, but to invite technical feedback, cryptographic review, and collaboration from the community to help make that crucial leap from being a strong prototype to being a fully-realized, live, ever-evolving private money . If you’re into ZK, TEEs, federated learning, or post-quantum crypto, I’d love your thoughts.
Links: Whitepaper: https://github.com/nerv-bit/nerv/blob/main/NERV_Whitepaper_v... GitHub repo: https://github.com/nerv-bit/nerv Code & tests: https://github.com/nerv-bit/nerv/tree/main/NERVCodeV2
Happy to answer any technical questions or discuss design trade-offs.