Last week by the numbers
neptune-core
twenty-first
triton-vm
triton-tui
Neptune Happenings
Proof System Improvements
@jfs has been doing design & architecture work for upgrades to the proof system of Triton VM. The first of several planned changes and improvements is the incorporation of deep commitments in combination with STIR, replacing the existing low-degree test, FRI. The replacement paves the way for future speedups in Triton VM. To the best of our knowledge, the only implementation of STIR is the reference implementation by the paper’s authors, so there may be some challenges ahead.
Vectorized Tip5 and Polynomial Functions
@jfs finalized the pull request that enables vectorized Tip5 hashing on CPUs with AVX-512 intrinsics. This speeds up TritonVM and increases a CPU guesser’s throughput. New versions of the twenty-first crate and Triton VM, which are to be released soon™, will include this speedup.
DOS Protection
@sword-smith merged PR #738 which provides some basic DOS protection against incoming connections in neptune-core’s P2P layer.
JSON-RPC support merged
PR 742 was merged which provides the start of a new set of RPC endpoints reachable via json-rpc. The implementation was built by external contributor @KaffinPX and is described in PR 726 as “a unified, type-safe, and extensible RPC layer”. Thank-you @KaffinPx for the hard work.
json-rpc has libraries in most every language, so this feature aims to enable wallets and other clients to interact with neptune-core using the developer’s language of choice.
Note that at this time, not all of the older tarpc based RPC endpoints have json-rpc equivalents.
Fiat Currency Conversions in Neptune Proton Wallet
@danda continued work on the Neptune Proton wallet, a GUI dashboard for the Neptune core wallet.
This week saw the introduction of USD (and other fiat currency) support in the wallet. This includes a framework for fetching data from CoinGecko or other price data oracles and the ability to view and enter amounts in fiat currency when sending transactions.
This functionality is viewed as exploratory work and is being done on a side branch. There is a counter-case to be made that an “official wallet” should not rely on any centralized oracle and should be a “pure” wallet for an NPT circular economy. For example the bitcoin-qt wallet has long taken this stance. No decision has been made at this time.
Regardless, the neptune-proton wallet will likely be used as the basis for a future web wallet, mobile wallets, etc. And these could certainly benefit from such functionality.
Neptune-cash listed on coinmarketcap.com
This may be slightly old news, but it seems worth mentioning that we’ve been listed on coinmarketcap.com as Neptune Cash with symbol NPT.
Videos: Intro to ZK-Starks lectures from LatinCrypt conference.
@aszepieniec recently delivered a series of lectures titled “Introduction to ZK Starks” at AsCrypto 2025. neptune-cash is of course built with ZK-Stark technology.
Reminder: 0.5.0 Feature Wishlist
A wishlist has been created for the next version of neptune-core. The team is soliciting community feedback, so please add your desired features on github, or just comment in this thread.
Website Facelift
Long time in the making, but it’s finally there. The project website, https://neptune.cash/, received a facelift. Many thanks to iMalFect for development and deployment. 