A New Chapter for the Mina Ecosystem

After a few months of planning and coordination, we’re excited to confirm that the transition between Mina Foundation and o1Labs is in its final stages. This strategic reorganization is an attempt to shake up the status-quo, to better support the Mina community and advance the protocol’s mission.

Transition Overview: New Roles, Focused Missions

Ownership of core operational functions has been transferred to o1Labs. Individual teams have been moving over and continue to do so. We’ve set up clearer decision-making structures that better focalize community feedback and are working together to step into these new modes of operation. 

• Engineering and Development: Leading technical innovation and protocol development
• Marketing and Communications: Amplifying Mina’s message and growing awareness
• Community Growth & Engagement: Fostering and supporting Mina’s vibrant global community
• Tools and Infrastructure: Building and maintaining essential developer and user tools
• Grants Program: Funding and supporting ecosystem development
• Delegation Program: Managing and optimizing the network’s delegation program

Expect o1Labs to be communicating a renewed vision for Mina, and tighter feedback loops between the community, the engineering team, and marketing efforts.

Mina Foundation, on the other hand, has streamlined to focus exclusively on the decentralized treasury: designing and deploying it with community feedback, seeding it with significant capital, and helping guide and deploy any community-directed changes to tokenomics to make the treasury (and Mina) long-term sustainable. With a significantly reduced team, the Foundation is now laser-focused on this critical responsibility. 

The Mina Foundation is also committing the equivalent of 2 years runway for the team members transferring over to o1Labs, and 1 year of grant and ecosystem growth spend to o1 as part of the transition and to provide financial backing towards o1Labs’ commitments — with the goal of having future grant / ecosystem spend coming directly from the decentralized treasury.

o1Labs: Immediate Priorities

Historically, we have had a tendency of trying to commit to too much at once, leading to delays and failures in delivery. To avoid this, o1Labs will be focused on only a few key initiatives over the coming months:

The Fall Protocol Upgrade

The o1Labs engineering team is working diligently toward a protocol upgrade proposed for fall 2025. This upgrade will introduce important enhancements to network performance, security, and functionality. Multiple Mina Improvement Proposals (MIPs) will go into this upcoming upgrade, with the first MIP about reducing slot times currently ready for review and input. We invite the community to follow along and participate in this process through Mina Protocol’s X and Mina’s Discord.

o1js Development and Optimizations

o1Labs is also dedicating a team internally to building and maintaining o1js for the long term, with the goal of developing a performant, best-in-class zkDSL that enables developers to express complex business logic in a streamlined way.

Ecosystem Project Support

o1Labs is doubling down on supporting key ecosystem projects that demonstrate the power of zero-knowledge proofs and Mina’s unique capabilities. The following are examples of some projects that are imperative for driving the ecosystem forward, and we’re providing dedicated support to ensure their success. This includes technical guidance, strategic partnerships, and resource allocation to help these projects reach their full potential.

• Silvana – A platform which converts public and private data into provable objects; recently powered the Zeko mint event on Mina
• Nori – A team working on bridge infrastructure, including putting proven Ethereum state on Mina. They are also looking into operating the Aligned Layer bridge, to enable a two-way bridge between Ethereum and Mina.
• zkUSD – An algorithmic zk stablecoin for Mina
• zkNoid – Building zk-provable gaming, including a lottery game; currently working on a more circuit-first approach to zk gaming.
• And more…

A New Way of Building…with Mina

Something that has become clear in the last several months is that the wrong expectations have been set about what it means to build within the Mina ecosystem. Rather than building on Mina as a monolith, it makes more sense for developers to build with Mina, treating it as a stack of resources/tools, such as o1js as a ZK Domain Specific Language (DSL), Mina protocol as a settlement layer, the web node as a query layer, and so on. 

Previously, the expectation was set that launching extra layers of infrastructure was the only way to achieve better and more performant apps. While additional infrastructure layers, such as Protokit and Zeko, are still very important for the ecosystem–Protokit provides an easy-to-use execution layer; Zeko provides an isomorphic Mina environment with fast transaction processing–builders don’t need to be blocked by the delivery of those platforms. Developers can leverage components of Mina’s stack today and build functioning apps. 

We realize that the documentation for understanding Mina’s stack and building with Mina in this new way is lacking at the moment. o1Labs is committed to creating more resources and content to help developers navigate this new paradigm, and to support them also by carving out spaces to get consistent technical support.

As mentioned earlier in this blog, o1Labs is also taking over the management of key programs that support builders and participants: 

• Grants Program: o1Labs will be running the grants program, and several key people from Mina Foundation who oversaw the grants program will be joining o1Labs. o1Labs will leverage their knowledge and plans to refine and improve existing processes and collaboration with grant recipients. Expect more communications from o1Labs in the coming weeks for details on what changes are coming.
• Delegation Program: Mina Foundation and o1Labs will work together to ensure a smooth handover of the delegation program to o1Labs. Our goal will be to understand and address how the delegation program can better serve our community. We are not planning any changes for the upcoming cycle.
• Developer Tools: o1Labs recognizes the need to take a more active role in building important ecosystem infrastructure (like bridges, libraries, etc), and will be dedicating a team to growing adoption of the most production-ready tools. At first, they will be working directly with developers in the community to overcome the specific technical challenges that are being faced today.

Looking Ahead

This transition isn’t just about organizational restructuring—it’s about positioning Mina for long-term success. The Mina Foundation’s focus on decentralized treasury management will ensure that community resources are allocated effectively and transparently. Meanwhile, o1Labs’ expanded role allows for more concentrated effort on technical development and ecosystem growth.

The coming months will be crucial as we work with the community to get Mina back on track, including delivering on important performance upgrades, helping developers build with Mina, revamping community and marketing efforts, and establishing governance frameworks for the decentralized treasury. We’re committed to ensuring that this process is transparent, inclusive, and aligned with Mina’s decentralized principles.

Stay connected with us for regular updates on progress, upcoming releases, and opportunities to get involved. The best is yet to come for Mina Protocol.