Introducing Nexus: The World's First Fully Onchain Agentic Framework

Today, we're taking a significant step towards a more open, transparent, and intelligent internet for billions of users worldwide. We are thrilled to introduce Nexus - the world's first framework for fully onchain autonomous AI agents, set to change how Crypto AI applications are built and pave the way for a true agentic economy.

Nexus empowers developers to create Talus Agents - AI-powered digital assistants that live and operate directly on Talus Network. Unlike centralized AI solutions, these agents ensure censorship resistance, full transparency, and seamless composability while performing complex tasks and making decisions. For consumers, this means personalized, intelligent services that can manage digital assets, automate online interactions, and enhance daily digital experiences - all with the security and openness of blockchain technology.

By bringing AI agents onchain, Nexus opens up a new realm of possibilities for decentralized applications and fosters an agentic economy where autonomous AI entities can interact, transact, and create value. From more intelligent DeFi protocols to advanced DAOs, Nexus paves the way for a future of intelligent, fair, and evolving digital systems, offering greater capabilities and transparent services to everyone.

This launch marks a pivotal moment in the convergence of AI and blockchain, offering the tools to shape a future of intelligent, trustless automation at scale. Join us as we explore the potential of Talus Agents and set a new standard for truly decentralized AI, redefining how billions can interact with and benefit from applications in their daily lives.

Why do AI Agents Need to be Onchain?

At Talus, we believe it to be imperative that AI Agents themselves, or the workflows that make up agents, live on a blockchain, for the following reasons:

• Censorship resistance: Existing Web2 AI agent services are typically provided by large platforms that may restrict usage and censor user queries for their benefit. In contrast, onchain agents operate in a decentralized system, allowing the agent owner to offer freely services to users with transparent and open rules.
• Transparency: Web2 AI operates as a black box. Users need more visibility into product development and delivery processes. In contrast, Talus agents provide complete transparency—everyone can observe the exact steps an agent takes to fulfill an intent. This transparency fosters trust among users.
• Composability: Unlike web2 programs, onchain agents can seamlessly interact on a common data layer (Talus), enabling efficient value transfer and coordination. This distributed approach is crucial for AI agents to transfer value. Just like humans need crypto for payments, AI needs crypto for payments.
• Verifiable Ownership and Governance: In Web2 AI agent models, ownership and governance are often solely controlled by centralized entities, limiting user input and creating opaque decision-making processes. Onchain AI agents address this by enabling clear, verifiable ownership structures and decentralized governance. This allows for the creation of community-owned applications, where stakeholders can directly influence the development and deployment of Talus Agents.

What is Nexus?

Nexus is a developer framework for building fully onchain AI agents. Nexus enables Talus Agents to operate, interact, and perform actions directly on Talus Network, providing trustless, transparent, and efficient methods to automate processes and execute tasks. These agents use smart contracts and decentralized infrastructure, offering significant advantages in terms of interoperability, composability, security for developers and businesses alike.

For Developers

As the first developer toolkit for onchain agents, Nexus provides a foundation for building the next generation of consumer Crypto AI applications. It offers tools, resources, and standards to create Talus Agents that can carry out user intents and communicate with each other on the Talus chain.

For Enthusiasts

Get ready for a new wave of applications that combine the potential of Decentralized AI with blockchain technology. While the full range of possibilities is still developing, Nexus paves the way for more intelligent and autonomous blockchain applications. Make sure to stay updated on our devnet and the first applications being developed on the platform.

Why Nexus Matters

A huge part of creating a vibrant developer environment is abstracting away complexity and making coding easier with libraries, tooling, frameworks, and standards. Talus is working to enable a fundamentally new product: AI agents that can autonomously transfer value. We built Nexus as a tool to make it easy for developers to code and deploy Talus agents. We want to empower developers to build great onchain AI products, and future iterations of Nexus will improve that developer experience.

Architecture

Since the inception of Talus, we’ve been committed to delivering security, speed, and the best developer experience. Nexus reflects these priorities through its modular architecture, which is designed to empower developers to build and manage AI agents. Nexus is built on Move and consists of several key components:

• Onchain Logic: The core logic is powered by Sui Move smart contracts, which manage the execution and orchestration of agentic workflows directly onchain. This allows for the secure, verifiable, and transparent execution of agent actions, ensuring the entire process remains decentralized and censorship-resistant.
• SDK: The Nexus Python SDK simplifies the process for developers, providing easy-to-use functions for setting up agents, interacting with smart contracts, and running workflows. This Pythonic SDK bridges the gap between AI and blockchain development, making it easy for AI developers to onboard without the need to learn smart contract programming.
• Offchain Infrastructure: LLM inference and external tool execution occur offchain. This deliberate choice optimizes performance and cost. Running large-scale inference onchain would be resource-intensive, so offloading these tasks allows for faster, more efficient execution without compromising the security of core onchain logic. These offchain components also offer flexibility in integrating external tools and services while maintaining critical orchestration securely onchain.

Spotlight on Nexus' Strengths:

1. Decentralized Autonomous Operation: Nexus enables Talus Agents to function permissionlessly and independently on the blockchain, making decisions and executing tasks with less frequent human input. It’s the first to bring onchain orchestration of agentic workflows.
2. Fully Onchain AI Agents: AI is computationally intensive, and its unpredictable nature doesn't align well with deterministic blockchain environments. To address this, we've combined off-chain computation with onchain identity for Talus Agents. This approach allows us to scale computational tasks while integrating with onchain workflows. We generate inferences off-chain and represent them on Talus as objects native to our MoveVM runtime. These inferences then influence the onchain agentic workflows, creating a seamless blend of AI capability and blockchain integrity.
3. Improving Onchain UX: At Talus, we believe the best onchain UX is automation. From enhancing DeFi with smarter portfolio management to improving gaming experiences, Nexus opens up new avenues for onchain automation. Talus Agents will save users time, money, and effort.
4. Superior DevX: Built using the Move language and MoveVM, Nexus offers best in class performance and security. It also enables a modular tech stack and Python SDK that make it accessible to both blockchain and Web2 AI developers.
5. Advancing Decentralized AI: By bringing AI agents onto the blockchain, Nexus takes a significant step towards decentralizing AI agents, broadening community participation, and making AI a fairer and more accessible technology.

What’s Next?

Our first iteration focused on feasibility and exploring the design space, allowing developers to build agents that work end-to-end. We’re constantly improving and expanding Nexus to make it more robust, flexible, and capable. Here are some key areas we are actively working on:

• Developing and experimenting with novel pricing/payment mechanisms.
• Implementing a slashing mechanism to penalize misbehaving nodes and maintain network integrity.
• Expanding support to include multiple modalities beyond LLMs.
• Enabling customization of tool parameters by both users and agents for greater flexibility.
• Introducing better error handling for agent responses to improve reliability.
• Implementing parallel execution capabilities to enhance task processing efficiency.
• Developing support for advanced task flow features, such as loops and backtracking, to handle more complex workflows.
• Providing offchain storage options to reduce onchain data storage needs.
• Introducing privacy features to allow for confidential or private data handling.

Be Part of the Journey

The launch of Nexus marks the beginning of an exciting journey towards a decentralized AI future. Nexus is pioneering this path one Talus Agent at a time, and we invite you to be part of this transformation:

• Developers: Explore Nexus on GitHub and fill out our interest form to get added to our group of builders.
• Enthusiasts: Stay informed about our progress by visiting our website, following us on Twitter, and reading our blog.

This is your opportunity to participate in the early stages of Decentralized AI. While we're still in the initial phases, the potential is immense. Join us as we work towards a future where AI and blockchain technology converge to create unprecedented possibilities.

About Talus

Talus Network is a next-generation L1 blockchain designed for building onchain multi-agent systems. We empower visionaries to create innovative consumer apps that combine blockchain and AI to reshape digital experiences. We recently launched Nexus, the first-ever developer framework for fully onchain AI agents. Through Talus Agents, users can enhance every aspect of their digital lives with automation, helping them achieve their fullest potential in a transparent, decentralized ecosystem.

To learn more about Talus, follow us on Twitter, check out our GitHub, visit our Discord, and read our blog.