Dev Update 2026-03-16

News and Announcements
1

Dev Update March 16, 2026

Date: March 16, 2026

1. Last Week by the Numbers

neptune-core

  • Issues: 2 opened, 4 closed
  • Pull Requests: 2 opened, 6 merged
  • Commits: 14 merged into master

triton-vm

  • Issues: 2 closed

2. Stand-up Summary

Alan Szepieniec

  • Last Week: Released Version 0.7 of Neptune Core, focusing on performance optimizations for balance calculations and exchange-integration endpoints. Managed community PRs and began the initial evaluation of the open-source GPU prover.
  • Coming Week: Integrate the GPU prover. Will be provisioning a GPU instance for the prover’s author to assist with development and may begin drafting a revised block header data structure.

Thorkil Værge

  • Last Week: Worked on VXB wallet CI integration, moving production builds to GitHub servers for increased transparency. Assisted in the 0.7 release and performance slimming.
  • Coming Week: Focusing on the VXB wallet upgrade to Neptune Core 0.7. This involves rewriting the RPC layer to support the new JSON RPC and utilizing type-safe client crates.

3. Technical Discussion

Neptune Core v0.7 & VXB Wallet Integration

The release of v0.7 significantly improved balance calculation speeds by eliminating redundant calculations and implementing better caching. The team is now transitioning the VXB wallet to this version. A key technical hurdle is the migration to the new JSON RPC; specifically, replacing the deprecated “block info” endpoint with logic centered on block headers. To support this, certain private functions within Neptune Core will be exposed to satisfy the VXB wallet as a canonical downstream dependency.

GPU Prover & Triton VM

There is ongoing work to integrate the open-source GPU prover. While the tool successfully achieves GPU acceleration for Triton VM—a significant technical milestone—the codebase is currently too immature and under-documented for a direct merge into the triton-vm repository. The team will continue to work with the author externally to refine the implementation.

Architectural Philosophy

A new development philosophy has been proposed for neptune-core, prioritizing robustness and simplicity over feature-completeness.

  • Quality metric: ought to include a count of lines of code, excluding tests. Fewer lines is better.
  • Downstream Features: Future advanced features should be implemented in separate crates or downstream repositories rather than within the core.

Lustration Barrier / Forks.

The team is discussing using the upcoming “lustration barrier”, which will require a fork and thus presents the opportunity to revise architectural patterns such as the block header data structure. However, the wisdom of such a revision is up for debate and likely will only be settled by working through the development process.

4. Updates and Announcements

  • Version 0.7 Released: Now live with major performance enhancements for exchanges and dashboard users.
  • CI/CD Shift: VXB wallet production builds are now handled via GitHub Actions to ensure verifiable binaries.
  • Community Growth: There has been a notable uptick in high-quality community Pull Requests; the team is prioritizing these reviews to expand the contributor base.
  • Contributor Guidelines: The CONTRIBUTING.md file will be kept up-to-date to reflect the new architecture policy regarding external crates for new features.