When Neptune launched in February of 2025, I expected that we would spend about one year making it a good and secure L1 for private and post-quantum transactions. Once that was done, we could turn to the exciting stuff: succinctness and novel smart contracts.
Now, almost 19 months after launch, I can see that that timeline was too optimistic. In hindsight, we have spent more time putting out fires than I would have liked to. We went through a (balance preserving) network reset, and later, two resets of the lustration barrier to uphold the guarantee that past soundness errors have not inflated the total monetary amounts.
With the newly released version 0.19.0 of neptune-core, I believe that most of the fire-fighting is behind us, and that we can now focus on the qualities that can make Neptune Cash truly stand apart from other blockchains: succinctness and an approach to smart contracts that unburdens the network from having to track program state.
Succinctness is one of the features I’m most excited about and where I will put my focus the next months. It means you can decide canonicity of a block by just downloading a single block. This will reduce the time required to synchronize to the network, from hours to less than a second, and it will allow Neptune to run trustlessly on smart phones and even smaller devices. On multiple occasions I have predicted that Neptune Cash will achieve succinctness this year, in 2026, and I continue to stand by that claim. Unfortunately, though, it seems like we are going to have to do a hard fork to implement succinctness. The reason for this is that the witness data of the transaction inputs are a) too big, and b) too computationally complex to handle in Neptune Cash’s zk-STARK VM [Triton VM](https://triton-vm.org/). Since succinctness is one of the core pillars of our vision of Neptune, we believe that this upcoming hardfork is worth the price.