[October 13, 2025] Blockchain development company Jelurida recently announced its proposal to migrate its early-stage project, Nxt, to a child chain within the Ardor blockchain ecosystem to ensure continued platform operations, technical upgrades, and community vitality. This proposal will be voted on by the Nxt forgers consensus mechanism , which will determine whether this new chapter will officially begin for the classic public blockchain, which has been operating stably for 12 years.
A 12-Year History of the Nxt Project: A Review of the PoS Pioneer
Nxt, launched on November 24, 2013, is the world's first public blockchain based entirely on the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. Since Genesis Block, Nxt has generated over 5.8 million blocks and processed over 3.2 million transactions, making it one of the earliest and most stable blockchain projects in history.
Despite this, with technological advancements and ecosystem evolution, Nxt's current codebase has essentially stopped being updated since 2022. While there are no major vulnerabilities, the platform continues to decline in terms of liquidity, community activity, and exchange support, and the number of forging nodes is also decreasing.
Jelurida stated that continuing to independently maintain a chain that is technically mature but has a shrinking ecosystem is no longer in the community's best interest and detrimental to long-term development. Therefore, the proposal to migrate to an Ardor child chain emerged.
Why Ardor? Why Migrate?
Ardor is a multi-chain blockchain platform launched by Jelurida in 2018, offering enhanced scalability and modularity. Subchains within its ecosystem, such as Ignis, share the security mechanisms of the Ardor mainchain while also possessing their own customizable functionality and token system.
Migrating Nxt to an Ardor child chain brings the following core advantages:
- Enhanced security : No longer relying on the increasingly scarce Nxt forgers, block security is now uniformly maintained by the Ardor mainchain;
- Functional upgrade : The new chain will obtain all current and future functional modules of Ardor, including asset trading, currency system, voting system, data cloud, etc.
- Decentralized trading : Through Ardor's native currency-to-currency trading system, Nxt will be able to circulate and exchange without relying on centralized exchanges;
- Ecosystem compatibility : The migrated Nxt child chain will become part of the Ardor ecosystem and interoperable with other child chain assets;
- Community fairness guaranteed : Nxt tokens have been in circulation for 12 years, with no pre-mining and no centralized control. The migrated chain will still maintain its fair distribution characteristics.
The decision-making power belongs to the community: Nxt forgers jointly determine the future
Jelurida made it clear that this migration is not just a technical choice, but also a manifestation of community governance. Therefore, the migration will be decided by Nxt forgers through an on-chain consensus mechanism .
The specific process is as follows:
Jelurida will release a new version of the Nxt client that supports "version 4" blocks;
Upgraded nodes will start generating version 4 blocks, while older nodes will still be using version 3.
The two parties will form a short-term chain fork, which will last for 1440 blocks (about 1 day);
If the version 4 chain wins, the migration will take effect immediately; if the version 3 chain prevails, the upgrade will be automatically abandoned and the old chain will continue to run.
Once the migration takes effect, the Nxt mainchain will stop generating new blocks at a predetermined height and take an on-chain snapshot of account balances, alias systems, currency system names, etc. at that time, and then integrate it into the next version of the Ardor mainchain as a new child chain.
Content that will not be migrated includes: assets, account attributes, market items, information messages, data cloud content, votes and voting results - these are already handled globally at the Ardor level and will not be imported repeatedly to avoid conflicts.
History is respected and the future is promising
Although the Nxt main chain will no longer generate new blocks after the migration, Jelurida will retain several nodes and continue to provide access to past transactions and data to ensure that Nxt history is not forgotten.
The Jelurida team stated: “We believe that Nxt, as a pioneer in public chain development, deserves a more modern and vibrant future. By migrating to an Ardor child chain, it will gain new life while maintaining its original spirit of decentralization and fair distribution.”
About Nxt: Launched in 2013, Nxt is the world's first pure PoS public blockchain project. It boasts independently developed intelligent features such as asset trading, an alias system, and a currency system. It pioneered numerous blockchain innovations and served as the technical prototype for many subsequent projects.
About Ardor: Ardor is a multi-chain blockchain platform developed by Jelurida. The main chain is responsible for security and consensus, while the child chains focus on functionality and assets, achieving a separation of performance and functionality. Ignis is its first child chain, fully supporting intelligent functionality and modular development.
About Jelurida Jelurida is a technology company dedicated to blockchain infrastructure development and commercial applications. It mainly maintains and operates the Ardor, Nxt and Ignis blockchain platforms.
