Daniel Marin
Daniel Marin is the founder and CEO of Nexus (Nexus Labs), a Layer 1 blockchain and zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM) network based in San Francisco, founded in 2022 to enable verifiable computation at global scale. His personal motto — "Building a future of mathematical truth" — appears on his personal website and LinkedIn. Marin has led the company since its inception, culminating in the launch of the Nexus mainnet in May 2026. He studied Computer Science, Theoretical Physics, and Mathematics at Stanford University, where he was advised by cryptography professor Dan Boneh, a Stanford professor widely recognised for his foundational work in applied cryptography, including co-creating the BLS signature scheme. Marin was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the Science category in 2025.[6] Prior to founding Nexus, he was a two-time bronze medalist at the International Physics Olympiad and completed software engineering internships at Google and Stanford's DAWN AI Lab.[4]
Early life and Education
Daniel Marin studied Computer Science with a specialisation in artificial intelligence, Theoretical Physics, and Mathematics at Stanford University. This interdisciplinary background directly informed his later work on zero-knowledge virtual machines. Prior to university, Marin earned bronze medals at the International Physics Olympiad in 2018 and 2019.[1]
While at Stanford, Marin interned as a software engineer at Google and at the DAWN AI Lab, gaining experience in machine learning and systems engineering. Inspired by the Nova paper from Microsoft Research and research at the Stanford Cryptography Lab, he conceptualised Nexus and founded the company in 2022 to develop general-purpose verifiable computing.[4]
Career
In 2022 Marin established Nexus Laboratories, Inc. in San Francisco with the mission of creating a "Verifiable Internet," where computations can be cryptographically validated. The initial concept was a distributed 'verifiable supercomputer' that leverages unused computational capacity globally to run zero-knowledge proofs at scale. Shortly after founding, Nexus closed a $2.2 million seed round led by Dragonfly Capital, with participation from Alliance, SV Angel, and Blockchain Builders Fund.[5]
Marin and his team developed the Nexus zkVM, an open-source zero-knowledge virtual machine written in Rust that can prove computations performed on a RISC-V processor. Marin co-authored the Nexus 1.0 whitepaper, published in January 2023.[7] In June 2024, Nexus raised a $25 million Series A co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Pantera Capital,[5] and simultaneously open-sourced zkVM 1.0 under an MIT licence. As part of this growth, the team recruited Jens Groth as Chief Scientist — the inventor of the Groth16 zkSNARK scheme and former Director of Research at DFINITY.[3]
Nexus ran three public testnet phases between December 2024 and 2025. Testnet III attracted over 3 million users and 6.7 million prover nodes across 190 countries. By March 2025, Nexus released zkVM 3.0, built on StarkWare's Stwo STARK prover, which delivered substantial performance improvements over earlier versions. On May 20, 2026, Marin launched the Nexus mainnet alongside the NEX token. The mainnet launched with EVM compatibility and generated over $111 million in first-day trading volume across major exchanges including Coinbase, Kraken, and Binance.[1]
Philosophy and Public Views
Marin has described his core motivation as building "a future of mathematical truth," where cryptographic proof, rather than institutional trust, underpins digital systems.[2][3] He has argued that zero-knowledge proofs are foundational for trusted computing across domains — from verifying AI model outputs to authenticating media in the era of deepfakes. He has expressed a vision in which Nexus nodes run on every device globally — computers, tablets, and smartphones — forming a global computation network. On finance, he has said: "We think everything will become a market, and everything will be traded with leverage and through synthetic assets," which informed Nexus's on-protocol exchange design.[2][3]
Recognition
In 2025 Marin was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the Science category for his leadership at Nexus and his work on enabling identity verification without requiring users to disclose personal information, using zero-knowledge proofs.[6] Forbes described Marin as someone who "dreams of an internet where a user's identity can be verified without risking giving up any of their own information."[6]
