Nimiq Protocol Roadmap

Aa - Stabilize, De-Risk & The Bridge Aiming to create a strong foundation for every other category in the roadmap, the milestones in this category focus on making the Nimiq blockchain as secure as possible and on making it interoperable with other blockchain networks. Ag - Privacy & compliance Aiming to make Nimiq private by default and provable when needed, the milestones in this category focus on protecting users’ financial privacy without turning the chain into a haven for illicit funds, a direct expression of Nimiq’s high moral and legal standards. The goal is privacy that does not legally force anyone into a corner. Ab - Quantum Resistance Aiming to keep Nimiq secure in a future where powerful quantum computers exist, the milestones in this category focus on choosing the cryptographic building blocks that later features will depend on, including the key and address format and whether a Layer-2 is feasible. Nimiq is not quantum-resistant today, and the team has already published its preliminary research on the road to quantum resistance. The three milestones below are closely entangled: the choice made in one constrains the other two. Ah - Interop, network & ecosystem Aiming to reach beyond Nimiq’s own chain and let others build on it, the milestones in this category focus on connectivity, governance and the tools an open ecosystem needs. Independence does not require isolation: openness means people can build on Nimiq, connect it and use it for purposes the Foundation never has to design itself. Ae - DeFi & liquidity Aiming to let value move and convert freely on-chain, the milestones in this category focus on swapping between assets without a middleman and on making staked NIM more useful. It follows the commitment to non-custodial exchange and payment routing across assets, wherever the necessary integrations and liquidity exist. Ac - Account & Key Management The milestones in this category focus on the identity and custody layer that users and later features build on: how keys are managed, replaced and recovered. Self-custody remains Nimiq’s default, but custody you hold yourself is custody you can lose, and making it safe and understandable for people who are not crypto natives is still ongoing work. Ad - Token utility, tokenomics and value Aiming to turn Nimiq into a payments chain for the assets people already hold, the milestones in this category focus on bringing stablecoins and Bitcoin onto Nimiq and on making them as easy to use as NIM. This is the bundle that makes the flagship end-user app (roadmap coming next) possible. Carrying assets other than NIM is a real change of scope: the experience being built toward is paying for lunch in a stablecoin, settled on Nimiq in seconds, from an app where only you hold the keys, with NIM doing the work underneath. NIM stays the network’s fee and staking asset; stablecoins and custom tokens do not replace its role, they give it more purpose. Af - Payments superiority Aiming to make paying on Nimiq simply better than the alternatives, the milestones in this category focus on speed, resilience and the kinds of payments people need every day. A payment network has to be cheap enough that small payments make sense and fast enough that nobody is left waiting.