Mercury: Accelerating Integrated Finance with Neutron’s Sovereign L1
Fast block times and cheap gas are table stakes. The next arms race in DeFi is unlocking new capabilities for entrepreneurs without fragmenting liquidity and users.
Neutron is at the forefront of this shift as the industry’s first integrated blockchain. By integrating financial infrastructure and applications with unprecedented depth, Neutron unlocks new DeFi products that maximize capital efficiency and execution quality.
Today, after months of hard work, the Neutron Foundation is proud to announce Mercury, Neutron’s upcoming graduation from Cosmos Hub’s Interchain Security (ICS) to a fully sovereign proof-of-stake network.
Beyond merely transitioning Neutron’s security architecture, the Mercury upgrade opens the next chapter in Neutron’s relationship with the Hub and introduces an array of exciting new developments, including greater utility and liquidity for NTRN, as well as vastly improved blockchain performance.
🔀 Read the Neutron governance proposal here
⚛️ Read the Cosmos Hub governance proposal here
Supercharging DeFi
Since its inception, Neutron has been empowering entrepreneurs to push the boundaries of what’s possible in DeFi. The thesis is simple:
- Financial market participants optimize for capital efficiency (i.e., more exposure on less capital), execution quality (i.e., the best prices), and UX.
- Optimally delivering on these properties requires an integrated approach that combines app-specific infrastructure and atomic composability.
The Mercury upgrade takes this even further, elevating Neutron’s speed and throughput to industry-leading levels while introducing powerful DeFi primitives and new opportunities:
- 11x Higher Throughput: 11x increase in gas per block from 30M to 330M, unlocking advanced DeFi applications like perpetual futures clusters.
- Unlocking 18x Faster Block Times: From ~1.8s today to ~0.1s by the end of the year for lightning-fast transactions and trades.
- Supervaults: A novel way to provide liquidity that makes liquidity provisioning lucrative and enables large trades with minimal slippage, leveraging Neutron’s built-in oracle and Cron module.
- New Ways to Earn: Earn NTRN staking rewards, Droplets, Ingots, and more by liquid staking NTRN for dNTRN and participating in Neutron DeFi.
- Rapid Onboarding: Create and fund a Neutron account in under 30 seconds with Neutron’s Ethereum signature verification, Privy, and Skip Go Fast integrations.
A new chapter for Neutron and the Hub
In 2023, Neutron made history as the first network to be secured through Cosmos Hub’s Interchain Security. This served as a strong foundation to bootstrap the ecosystem. Now, as Neutron matures, it is time to evolve into a sovereign L1 network.
This upgrade proposal opens the next chapter in the relationship between the Cosmos Hub and Neutron, empowering both communities to progress rapidly toward their goals:
- It signals support for launching smart contracts on the Hub to bootstrap a native, ATOM-aligned ecosystem and offer best-in-class service to appchains to become the center for interchain services, driving value to ATOM.
- It empowers Neutron to continue cultivating an ecosystem of unique, powerful, and deeply integrated DeFi applications by improving network performance and infrastructure reliability, targeting new, exciting markets, driving value to NTRN, and enabling new use cases.
- It introduces the ATOM Reward Program, enabling ATOM holders to earn exclusive rewards by participating in Neutron DeFi, reinforcing the Hub’s alignment with the broader ecosystem.
🎙️ Set a reminder to join us for a special ICL & Neutron Townhall space on X on Friday, March 21st at 10 AM EST, as we dive into the Mercury upgrade.
Looking ahead
Mercury represents a significant step forward in Neutron’s mission to revolutionize finance. With support from the Neutron Foundation, Interchain Labs, and the network’s communities, Neutron is expected to complete the Mercury upgrade on April 9th.
The future is bright — and we’re just getting warmed up.
About Cosmos
Cosmos is the Internet of Blockchains. An ecosystem of sovereign, interoperable appchains built on the Cosmos Stack. The Cosmos SDK, the Inter-blockchain Communication Protocol (IBC), CometBFT, and other modular components — the Cosmos Hub is the home of ATOM, and the founding chain of this ecosystem.
About Neutron
Home to an expanding array of cutting-edge, tightly integrated DeFi applications such as Mars, Drop, Astroport, and others, Neutron is a rapidly growing smart contract platform that enables entrepreneurs to build and scale breakthrough financial applications.
Unlike generalized L1s that provide generic infrastructure regardless of an application’s needs, Neutron is an integrated blockchain focusing exclusively on DeFi by making highly-performant, application-specific infrastructure available to any DeFi protocol. This tailored approach allows entrepreneurs to build new types of protocols that improve capital efficiency, execution quality, and UX — all within a shared execution environment that ensures atomic composability.
Join a community of entrepreneurs, creators, and explorers
- Trade NTRN on Binance, Kraken, and Kucoin, as well as on the Neutron Portal where you can swap on-chain assets from any network for NTRN.
- Join the Neutron Community on Telegram
- Join the Neutron Community on Discord
- Build with Neutron Foundation support
- Follow Neutron on Twitter
