Vince joined Mina’s community in April 2021, soon after Mainnet launched. He is based in French Overseas Territory and quickly became an active member of the Mina French-speaking community as he studied the protocol before starting to run a node. Now he represents Towerstake, an agency of developers creating data analysis tools for Mina delegators and validators.
Vince is an experienced developer with 10 years of experience and aims to bring more French entrepreneurs to zero-knowledge and light blockchain technologies. Alongside his contributions to Mina, he is also the CEO of a tech startup specializing in building APIs, runs a digital agency, and serves as a board member on a couple of non-profit organizations.
(Interview has been edited for clarity)
What drew you to Mina Protocol?
I was excited to finally see something new among blockchain technologies! Right away, I could see the benefits of Mina for the future of our digital lives. Since Mina had recently launched when I discovered it, there were limited tools in the ecosystem, and my business partner and I recognized an opportunity to test our products there. We were overwhelmed with positive feedback from the community after sharing and have been adding new features and more tools ever since.
Mina’s community is very helpful and respectful, making it stand out from the rest. I am also looking forward to what can be done with zkApps, and playing with the code.
What are you working on for Mina?
I represent Towerstake, a startup with expertise in APIs, web development, and dashboards. We have created a number of data analysis tools for Mina Protocol and also provide staking of Mina tokens.
We have launched many tools for Mina and have many more ideas in mind so stay tuned! Here are a few that are live now:
- (Better) Uptime Leaderboard for block producers participating in the delegation program to efficiently measure and track their uptime
- Mina Time Machine to easily convert time to an epoch on Mina Protocol as well as find details about ledger hash, start and end date for a given epoch.
- Block Producer & Delegator Calculators were the first tools we built which helped us to calculate an expected return from running a or delegating to a validator node on Mina Protocol.
Our aim is to become a trusted partner in the Mina ecosystem and contribute to its further development. We also want to raise the awareness of French entrepreneurs for zero-knowledge proof and light blockchain technologies. For now, we plan to add new features to the dashboards so that our delegators can see how many blocks are expected for the current epoch on our node, and how many were already won. We are also excited to test zkApps to see if they can help us authenticate private data from validators. As you can see, Mina tooling keeps us pretty busy! So stay tuned.
Join Vince and other community members on the Mina Discord.
You can also follow Vince and Towerstake on Twitter or visit their website to learn more and support their work.
About Mina Protocol
Mina is the world’s lightest blockchain, powered by participants. Rather than apply brute computing force, Mina uses advanced cryptography and recursive zk-SNARKs to design an entire blockchain that is about 22kb, the size of a couple of tweets. It is the first layer-1 to enable efficient implementation and easy programmability of zero knowledge smart contracts (zkApps). With its unique privacy features and ability to connect to any website, Mina is building a private gateway between the real world and crypto—and the secure, democratic future we all deserve.
