The Neptune Cash software project has evolved dramatically since the network launched in February 2025. Besides fixing four soundness bugs, figurative mountains have been lifted to make the client faster and more robust, and not to mention practically usable. The core foundation is largely complete and it’s time to start planning downstream applications like smart contract support in the client and dapps that leverage that.
In fact, if you draw the boundaries the way we do, you could say there is only one piece missing from the core foundation: succinctness, which is the feature that allows clients to trustlessly synchronize to the network by downloading just one block. And even this feature’s foundational quality is debatable because we can (and plan to!) deploy this via a soft fork. Thor is carrying the heavy load here and expects to complete this task this year (2026).
With the foundation firmly laid and the project’s future secured, the time is right to re-evaluate the financial feasibility of full-time development. Neptune Cash cannot at this time sustain a full time salary; and to improve my personal finances I have decided to pursue employment that can. To clarify, I am by no means withdrawing completely; this move just means that my involvement going forward will be (and in fact, in the past few weeks has been already) limited to spare hours that don’t interfere with work and family time.
This move is made somewhat grudgingly because there are still big exciting developments in the pipeline that I would love to have a bigger hand in realizing. That said, a gradual torch handover was always the plan. Right now the fact of the matter is that the foundations are laid, the groundwork is solid, the technical pipeline is clear, and Thor is driving the succinctness soft fork to completion. New contributors are stepping up and AI can dramatically lower the learning curve for more new contributors, or even write ancillary applications outright. If now is not the right time to start passing the torch, when is?