2024 brought big changes to Mina. The biggest development has been the launch of Mina’s zkApp layer in June of this year, which made Mina the first blockchain to go live with a Turing-complete zero-knowledge smart contract layer. This was a multi-year, highly complex project, and its release is a testament to the hard work and dedication of the teams that made it possible.

Since then, Mina Foundation has spent the second half of the year supporting the development of the applications and layers on top of the new zkApps layer. This in turn has set up the first half 2025 for a long list of imminent launches that will bring zk application usability on top of Mina.

This is an exciting transition for Mina, marking the shift into a phase of delivery and growth. 2024 already saw Mina as one of the fastest growing ecosystems in terms of full-time developers. Going forward, our goal at Mina Foundation is to support this new phase for the project, and in addition to core protocol development, the onboarding of new use cases, applications, and users onto the network over 2025.

Onboarding Use Cases and Users

These new use cases will include many standard blockchain application support to Mina – things like token bridges, state bridges, mobile support, and multiple DEXes.

In addition though, it will include zk-enabled applications, with novel functionality, such as private voting with zkVot or Punkpoll, private RWA ownership proofs with Mirae, private finance such as zkUSD, and many private sources of private data, such as zkPassport, zkKYC, zkTLS, and zkEmail.

Most of these projects are slated to launch soon – below is a subset, all of which are projected to launch early 2025, with many of them launching in January.

This should be an exciting first few months of the year for Mina, as many applications start going live!

As these launches unfold, Mina Foundation will be working tirelessly to ensure seamless integration across all applications, while also expanding support for additional proof types and use cases on Mina.

Mina Foundation Focus and Strategy

With the launch of all of this functionality, we imagine Mina to start serving as the premier platform for the proving, verification, and composition of various zero knowledge proofs.

Our job at Mina Foundation then becomes to:

• Onboard more sources of data: This includes solutions like zkTLS, zkKYC, zkPassport. We’re also considering a dedicated Navigators track to onboard even more data.

• Nurture and grow more use cases of data: This includes applications like private voting, privacy layers for RWA ownership, minting tokens based on zero knowledge proofs of credentials, and other use cases which integrate proofs as a component of their design.

• More work on the core platform: Support Mina’s capability as a platform for verifiable applications and the composition of these zero knowledge proofs. This includes projects like protokit, the Ethereum state bridge, client-side proving enhancements, and the user incentive program.

If these three all work well, they can create a zero knowledge proof flywheel for Mina – linking proof sources on one end, use cases of proofs on the other, and Mina’s technology supporting the ecosystem. Our top priority now at the Foundation is identifying high-value business partners that can make good use of this data.

We also have an exciting lineup of early builders innovating on Mina – verifiable games, RWA platforms, zkTLS solutions, voting platforms, and other data sources – and we look forward to accelerating the growth and support of Mina’s builder community towards expanding the breadth of applications on Mina in 2025. 

We hope that this can be the beginning of enabling ‘httpz’ for the internet. By the end of 2025, we aim to have hundreds of different types of proofs you can make through Mina – and dozens of useful applications, across web2 and web3, consuming those proofs to enhance the functionality of applications and unlock new ones.

Web node

Beyond the launch of Mina’s zkApp smart contract layer, 2024 also saw the Mina web node reach full feature completeness and testing on devnet. This opens up the possibility for browser wallets to run the web node, and directly connect to the Mina network to send transactions and verify the full state of the network and applications, thereby providing strong censorship resistance guarantees as well as the ability of clients to fully verify state on Mina. It also enables block producing nodes to run directly in the browser.

We’ll be starting programs early 2025 for people to start running these browser nodes. Our goal is a world where everyone operates cryptocurrency networks from their own devices, with massively wide distribution. This wouldn’t just solve the home stakers problem for decentralization, but would lead to an order of magnitude more decentralization for web3 on Mina.

Ultimately, our goal is to enable massively distributed consensus participation for Mina, surpassing the current levels in web3, so it can serve as a legitimate public good for everyone.

We think if network operation is available to everyone, that this level of decentralization can help further legitimize cryptocurrency in the eyes of the broader public, and enable verifiable applications that have broad trust and widespread public legitimacy.

If you are interested in this please keep an eye out for our first web node tests early next year.

Scaling Mina

While there is a lot of work at the use case and user level, behind the scenes there is still a lot of work going into scaling the core protocol. This includes both scaling the L1 itself — highlighted by the recent roadmap from o1Labs, and the performant Rust node under development at Mina Foundation —as well as scaling Mina’s verifiable application layer with Protokit. Stay tuned for more on this, we will aim to share more on this vision for scaling Mina early next year.

2025

The first half of the year, up until the launch in June, we were working hard at bringing the zkApps smart contract upgrade to Mina. Now 6 months later, we are deep into the next layer of Mina, and the development of many applications on top of it.

This is an exciting moment for Mina, and for the broader potential of what we can contribute to the internet and zero knowledge proofs.

I’m particularly excited about the transformative power of the zero knowledge proofs for the internet–empowering individuals and organizations to re-shape their relationships with institutions and one another, towards a world with more trust and opportunities to build trustworthy systems.

I believe this is the real opportunity – can we build something that catalyzes new ways of interacting, sharing information, and building organizations than has been possible before? Next year we’ll start to see, as more applications built on zero knowledge proofs emerge and the Mina platform continues to evolve.

If you want to help us build the private, provable web, join the Mina community on Discord and sign up for our newsletter.