Announcement,Ecosystem Update

A new funding process for Mina’s ecosystem

This blogpost explores an additional, community-led Mina Ecosystem Funding (MEF) process to support longer-term, decentralized and sustainable funding for teams providing ongoing services to Mina Protocol. 

The rationale for Mina Ecosystem Funding

In the last blogpost, we provided an update about Mina Foundation’s existing grant programs. Here, we propose an additional, community-led Mina Ecosystem Funding (MEF) process to support longer-term, decentralized and sustainable funding for teams providing ongoing services to Mina Protocol. 

Decentralized decision-making about ecosystem funding

Currently, funding decisions are mainly made by the Mina Foundation through its existing grants programs: Core Grants and Navigators. We propose to develop an additional, community-led funding process where community members can make all the funding decisions. This Mina Ecosystem Funding (MEF) process would ensure that project teams and services deemed to be important for the community can still be supported to ensure the continued maintenance and growth of the protocol (see Figure 1a).

How this functions will depend on the configuration of the underlying governance process. While there is much we have learned about grant programs over the last few years, an experimental and incremental approach is needed to best determine how to optimize the efficacy of the program and its alignment with the wishes of the community. This approach will allow the community to iteratively add, test and improve the governance of the MEF process and its workstreams. To support this, the Mina Foundation has started to fund and test an initial governance process and tooling for MEF with some community members. This funding will be incremental to the Mina Foundation funds already allocated to programs, such as Core Grants and Navigators. 

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

Figure 1 Funding Mina Ecosystem Funding sustainability 
Figure 1A Figure 1B

Sustainable ecosystem funding

Mina Protocol has a wide set of public goods contributors, including Mina Foundation and o1labs, as well as an increasing number of other contributors. 

MEF aims to ensure that there will be sustainable development for these teams producing public goods for the protocol, to ensure the protocol can continue to fund its maintenance and growth.

Mina Foundation will initially fund MEF. In the longer term, Mina Protocol will need to secure additional, ongoing sources of funding beyond the fund contributed by Mina Foundation, such as an on-chain treasury, perhaps drawing funding from a share of transaction fees, inflation or some other mechanism. Starting to develop and test MEF now is necessary so that a robust, well-tested, community-led decision-making process is ready for whenever an on-chain treasury becomes available (see Figure 1b). 

Clarifying the scope of MEF

We are looking for real-world use cases to develop and test MEF with the community so we are keen to clarify its scope in the light of existing grants programs (see Table 1). MEF would fund teams and programs to provide ongoing services to the ecosystem. Community members would submit funding proposals for suitable projects that would be reviewed by subject-matter experts before being voted on by the community. Approved MEF projects would be funded upfront with reporting requirements so the wider community could track their progress for transparency and accountability.

Table 1 Clarifying the scope of Mina Ecosystem Funding 
Scope Examples 
Projects and teams providing ongoing services to the ecosystem.
  • Teams working on core infrastructure (e.g. wallets)
  • Teams supporting ongoing events and meetups
  • Teams supporting core protocol development
  • Protocol Governance Facilitators & Reviewers
  • Community-operated technical projects (e.g. Mina Developer Alliance)

Testing an initial MEF governance process

In the next blogpost, we will explain how we have started to test an initial governance process for MEF with some community members. We will also present the key learnings from this initial test, plans for further testing, and how to get involved. 

Thank you everyone in the ecosystem for your time and effort in building it to where it is today. We are really excited to develop with the community the funding processes that can unlock the full potential of the Mina Protocol and transform it into a globally recognized platform that drives innovation and leads the next generation of blockchain and zero-knowledge technologies. Let’s go!

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.

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