# Nethermind Quarterly Update - Q1 - 2026 **URL:** \ **Category:** Aztec\ **Created:** [May 13, 2026, 3:37pm UTC](https://forum.aztec.network/t/nethermind-quarterly-update-q1-2026/8565 "2026-05-13T15:37:19Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![JohnC](https://dub1.discourse-cdn.com/flex013/user_avatar/forum.aztec.network/johnc/32/2748_2.png) [@JohnC](https://forum.aztec.network/u/JohnC)\ **Post date:** [May 13, 2026, 3:37pm UTC](https://forum.aztec.network/t/nethermind-quarterly-update-q1-2026/8565/1 "2026-05-13T15:37:19Z")
# Summary The Nethermind team has focused on a number of workstreams over the last quarter, including Alpha work, shipping the multi-asset FPC, kicking off the Aztec Wallet, a broad working of research (GPU proving, L3 & TEE multi-proving, prover economics, PIR, personal-data marketplace), product maintenance on Gov Dashboard and Aztec nodes, devrel tooling and events! The major focuses this quarter were: - **Aztec Alpha Development** - Worked on hardening core protocol infrastructure, security, and mainnet-alpha readiness across networking, state management, and operational reliability. - **Research** - Focused on advancing protocol research across scaling, proving infrastructure, economics, and privacy primitives. - **Aztec Wallet kickoff** - Kicked off a new desktop wallet and are racing towards an MVP. - **FPC development** - Developed a multi-asset fee payment contract as a deployable infrastructure. - **Devrel & Tooling** - Built a number of developer tools like Testnet Faucet, Aztec-lint, and Aztec-watcher. ## Deliverables for Q2: - **Engineering** - GPU Proving - GPU proving generates Aztec proofs ~10× faster than CPUs. Faster transactions for users, on cheaper hardware for provers. - Definition of done: Barretenberg Icicle MSM integration merged with reproducible benchmarks and documented integration path. - **Research** - Multi-Prover Architecture and Research - Enables additional safety and trust for adoption, and transacting with assets on Aztec. - Definition of done for Q2: Multiple components and long timeline to completion, depending on initial research results. - Architecture Design and consensus finding - TEE Implementation Research - Start coordination around implementation - **Product** - Wallet - General purpose Aztec desktop wallet to support adoption. - Definition of done: Can open wallet, and interact and transact on the Aztec Network - **Devrel** - Aztec Remix Plugin - A browser based Aztec development IDE that removes the toolchain setup barrier for first time builders. - Definition of done: Able to interact with Aztec network via Remix IDE. - Documentation - Efforts based on team feedback to support and update documentation. - Definition of Done: Ongoing! * * * # Workstreams ## Engineering ## Alpha/Protocol Major components: - **Mempool Improvements** - Improved the mempool with a sorted collection implementation, codified reorg rules in world state sync, and added low-priority tx eviction after pruning. - Implemented price-bump replacement so users can supersede stuck transactions, added rejection of txs that exceed DA or mana limits at admission, and fixed a bug where evicted txs were on node restart. - **P2P / Networking** - Integrated BatchTxRequester with FastTxCollection over dynamic peer sets and resolved a race in fast\_txs\_collection. Added smart peer-scoring penalties for failed req-resp responses. - **Audit hardening - 34 issues** - Covered wire-format versioning and P2P hardening, bounded deserialization for DoS resistance (15 of 22 P2P call sites were missing maxSize), PXE error-handling robustness, and crypto/timing safety (decryption timing oracle, non-constant-time comparisons, missing length prefix collision risk). - Also fixed gas-math precision (Number() on bigint silently truncating above 2^53), resource lifecycle (executeBB timeouts, zombie children), L1 integration (silent Multicall3 reverts), and URL / JSON-RPC / BigInt / blob / beacon validation. - **World state fixes to be reorg safe** - Shipped COMMIT\_FORK, which fixes an archiveRoot to forkId race that was producing false reorg detection. Contract data now soft-deletes on prune and only hard-deletes at finalization. - Fixed a checkpoint-building race and refactored config to be type-safe. - **Public-setup validation & allowlist** - Re-enabled function selectors in txPublicSetupAllowList, added arg-shape validation, and tightened set\_authorized and only\_self checks. - **Operational robustness** - Fixed blob-tx simulation, added publisher rotation on failure, enabled multi-EOA publisher funding, added keystore hot reload and auto-stop signaling, and improved BlobFilestore download handling. - **Test Clearance** - Cleared 10 flaky tests around epochs, P2P, and consensus slashing. - **Tooling fixes** - Fixed a zig cc cross-compilation issue where targeting native on Graviton CI emitted SVE instructions that failed at runtime on M3. - **Post-launch incident response** - Supported recovery through the April 1 - 3 block-header-mismatch outages, the April 20 reorg, and the late-April MessageStoreError. * * * ## Research - **Multi-proving Exploration** - Ongoing exploration of different solutions to introduce a 2nd prover “redundancy layer” for Aztec’s private-state ZK. - We see this as a critical security upgrade for the system for driving adoption among any token-security/-recoverability conscious users, especially for any use case bridging assets into L2. - **GPU proving** - Explored GPU proving, to enable hardware-accelerated proving in Barretenberg, with early benchmarks and designs. Finishing results, and will be sharing soon! - **Prover economics** - Contributed to the community conversation on more consistent prover rewards - [LINK](https://forum.aztec.network/t/proposal-optimizing-prover-rewards-for-more-consistency/8528/7) - **Pool FPC v2** - Generated a spec for a self-balancing on-chain AMM model that broadens who can provide fee-payment liquidity, lowers operational overhead, and returns overpayments to users automatically. - **Proving optimizations** - WASM 5 - 7% mont mul speed increase (merged) - [LINK](https://github.com/AztecProtocol/aztec-packages/pull/22481) - WASM 20% e2e proving speed increase (PR proposed). Refracted the code to compute two field multiplications together at the cost of only 1.2× single multiplication, instead of 2x. - [LINK](https://github.com/ElusAegis/aztec-packages/pull/8) - WebGPU WASM client-side proving - Quick investigation with of the shelf libraries, indicating as infeasible for now (~40× _slower_ than CPU for 2^18 MSM). - **L3 Exploration** - Building on the initial L3 sketch, we explored moving more complex functionality into the L3 while still leveraging the compression techniques enabled by proof verification using the L2 private execution. - Given the customizability of L3s, this path had the potential to enable a recoverability and throughput optimized instance of Aztec. - Although initial results were promising, we paused this exploration to focus on improving the L2. - **Intern Exploration - Personal Data Marketplace** - Generate a proof-of-concept personal data marketplace where users keep their data, buyers receive the answers they paid for, and Aztec guarantees the fairness of the exchange. * * * ## Product - **Fee Payment Contracts (FPC)** - Multi-Asset FPC to testnet with Docs! - [LINK](https://github.com/NethermindEth/aztec-fpc) - **Aztec Wallet** - Building a general Aztec wallet for web3 users. - Sneak peak - More **SOON!™** ![image](https://europe1.discourse-cdn.com/flex013/uploads/aztec/original/2X/7/767871ee7ba6d5f89d4049e323e2759253dab438.png) - **Aztec Oracle contracts (semi research)** - Explored Oracle design on Aztec for Push and Pull functions (write to contract, and consumer fetch). Navigating a trilemma of privacy / freshness / contention for private oracle reads. - **AztecNodes Maintenance** - Added support for Mainnet and fixed a number of issues with [AztecNodes.xyz](http://AztecNodes.xyz) to properly present mainnet information. - **Governance dashboard** - Built the Aztec Governance Dashboard - [LINK](https://aztecgov.nethermind.io/) * * * ## DevRel - **Aztec Faucet** - Built the Aztec Testnet Faucet - [LINK](https://aztec-faucet.nethermind.io/) - Handles L2 Fee Juice bridging, L1 Sepolia ETH drip, keypair gen and deploy and claim for new accounts. - **Aztec Skills** - Built an installer for Aztec-focused agent skills - [LINK](https://github.com/NethermindEth/aztec-skills) - Six skills across: aztec-contracts, aztec-deployment, aztec-js, aztec-testing, aztec-wallet-sdk, aztec-pxe - Install: npx install-aztec-skills@latest - **Aztec-lint v0.1.0** - Released aztec-lint v0.1.0, a deterministic linter for Noir projects with Aztec-specific static analysis. - [LINK](https://forum.aztec.network/t/announcing-aztec-lint-v0-1-0/8481) - **Aztec Watcher** - Built a npm release monitor for aztec developers - [LINK](https://github.com/NethermindEth/aztec-watcher) * * * ## Events - **ETHDenver** - Booth take over! - **EthCC** - Booth take over! - **London Chaos Testing** - An amazing time! (those chicken wraps… 🤤) ---
**Author:** ![KevinLomax](https://dub1.discourse-cdn.com/flex013/user_avatar/forum.aztec.network/kevinlomax/32/367_2.png) [@KevinLomax](https://forum.aztec.network/u/KevinLomax)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2026, 5:59pm UTC](https://forum.aztec.network/t/nethermind-quarterly-update-q1-2026/8565/2 "2026-06-01T17:59:44Z")
Incredible work. The community is excited for the wallet! I am hopeful you will bulid a bridge as well 🙂