An update on zkIgnite and Mina Foundation’s grant programs

Summary

This blogpost provides an update about Mina Foundation’s grant programs.

With four cohorts of zkIgnite now wrapped up, we’ve been reflecting on, and celebrating, the successes of zkIgnite. However, based on our experience of running other grant programs over the last few years, we will be retiring the zkIgnite program to focus on Navigators and Core Grants.

We wanted to clarify the purpose and scope of these different programs to help community members understand the key differences between them.

Discontinuing zkIgnite 

zkIgnite kicked off in late 2022 with cohort 0 to support the expansion of zero-knowledge and bootstrap developers and projects in the ecosystem. A series of challenges and tutorials were launched, bringing together hundreds of developers to build zkApps and oracles, opening the door to a new era. In early 2023, cohort 1 was launched with a new mission to help developers and entrepreneurs turn their ideas into real-world applications and build successful businesses on Mina Protocol. Mentors were introduced to provide technical guidance and a team of community electors was established to make funding allocation decisions. The mission remained the same when cohort 2 and cohort 3 were launched in 2023 and 2024, respectively.

zkIgnite has been great for bringing developers into the ecosystem to collaborate, share knowledge and build together. However, over the course of zkIgnite, we learned a lot more about what kind of support is necessary to best enable the iterative, continuous-delivery style development most relevant to the current stage of the ecosystem, so Navigators has been molded into a design to meet these needs.

Restructuring Navigators 

The Navigators program has a heavy emphasis on technical mentorship, hands-on support and fast delivery. It supports teams that are in the early to mid-life cycle of their projects, accelerating the deployment of applications/tooling into production. We have found that this style of project grants is a better match for the iterative and early to mid-lifecycle stage that most zkApp projects are finding themselves in compared to the fixed delivery schedule in the first cohorts of zkIgnite.

Navigators program now includes two different tracks to enable developers with different experiences to join the Mina ecosystem:

• Starter Track onboards developers and teams that understand zero knowledge but do not have a firm understanding of the Mina Protocol. They work closely with mentors who guide them through building a Proof of Concept for their project. Upon completion, Starter Track participants are expected to progress to the Growth Track.
• Growth Track supports teams in the early and mid-lifecycle of their projects to seed new ideas, support strong projects and accelerate them towards building a product or tooling to deploy to production. The Navigators exploration team supports teams to unblock any technical challenges.

You can see all in-progress and completed Navigators growth grants here, and you can apply here. 

Continuing with Core Grants 

Core Grants program provides funding for changes to the core protocol or its infrastructure, requiring greater oversight and expert review (than other funding programs) of each step in the project to ensure the changes are secure, efficient, and effective.

You can learn more about the program, engage in discussion and submit Requests For Proposals (RFPs) here.

Comparing grant programs

We have been clarifying the scope of these programs to help community members understand the key differences between them (see Table1).

Milestone vs continuous delivery 

One insight from zkIgnite has been the need for flexible funding approaches. Some projects have a fixed scope where deliverables are well defined at the outset so that funds are awarded upon the delivery of these deliverables. For other more exploratory and open-ended projects, such as research and development (R&D), deliverables are less defined or clearly known at the outset or could change during the project, requiring ongoing monitoring (by the grant program or project team) so that funding can respond to their changing needs. 

Both Core Grants and Navigators are milestone-based grant programs that fund fixed-scope projects; however, Navigators is also flexible enough to support more exploratory and open-ended projects. 

Table 1 Clarifying the scope of Mina Foundation’s existing grant programs

Next steps

A huge thank you to everyone who has participated in Mina Foundation grant programs. The standard of proposals received reflects the incredible talent, dedication, and creativity of the Mina developer community. 

While the focus on Navigators and Core Grants reflects our focus on building the most efficient programs for continuous delivery of zkApps and other projects, we plan on cultivating a new community-governed funding process to support longer-term decentralized and sustainable funding for projects building on Mina. Stay tuned!