Ecosystem Updates – April 2022

Over the last month, the Mina ecosystem has seen some exciting updates: 

• Several new team members joined the Mina Foundation to help support the growing Mina ecosystem and community. The new team members include former Diem executive Kurt Hemecker as COO, Brian McKenna as Head of Product, Dr. Iryna Tsimashenka as Head of Developer Relations, and Kate Remias as Head of People. 
• More exchanges have continued to list MINA and make it available for staking, such as Coinbase and Kraken. 
• In an effort to ensure further decentralization of Mina Protocol, the delegation committee took community feedback into consideration and shared a plan to improve the delegation program, to be rolled out over the next several months. 
• The Mina community was well represented at DevConnect this past week in Amsterdam, participating in zkSummit 7 and the ETHAmsterdam hackathon, and meeting many awesome builders at the zkHappy Hour. The ETHAmsterdam hackathon received 165 project submissions, the highest ever in the history of ETH hackathons, and Mina was excited to have received 9 of those submissions. To further support developers building on Mina, the Mina Foundation is awarding prizes to 4 of the top teams who incorporated Mina into their project. We will be sharing more on the last week and hackathon projects soon!

Updates

*Please note that each ecosystem update may contain forecasts, projections, targets or other forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements are based on the relevant ecosystem partner’s estimates and assumptions based on information available at the time such update is made. Accordingly, plans, goals and other statements may not be realized as described, and actual results may differ materially from those presented in such an update. In addition, the Mina Foundation is not responsible for updates made by community contributors, whose work are independent from any of the initiatives that the Mina Foundation or its ecosystem partners are working on, unless otherwise stated. 

=nil; Foundation – Mikhail Komarov, Founder

For the last month, the =nil; Foundation team has been polishing the proof generator circuits. This allowed us to, first of all, consider proof generator circuits as ready for the audit and, second of all, finally get the in-browser auxiliary proof generation and verification demo done.

This demo allows a user who owns an account on Ethereum’s Ropsten to walk through all the critical steps of the bridge core: retrieve Mina’s state proof, pre-process it right in browser, submit it to the target protocol and verify it in there. Currently, we deploy every part of the Kimchi proof verification circuit in-EVM part independently to every EVM-enabled protocol, component by component. For the sake of the demo, it is proving a part of the Kimchi verification circuit because it is faster – nobody is going to go through the whole demo if one would need to wait for the full verification circuit generation. That is why the demo verifies only a part of a whole circuit. This limits the overall functionality for now. The next major milestone in front of us is a finalization of the verification part. 

It would be very helpful if the Mina community can review the verification part code because it is the least ready part for now and external review is never redundant. Any feedback is welcome on the Github repo. 

Major PRs this month are two of these huge ones:

1. Batched LPC/FRI commitment scheme. https://github.com/NilFoundation/crypto3-zk/pull/40 and https://github.com/NilFoundation/evm-placeholder-verification/pull/2. Important for the sake of performance improvements on both sides, proof generation and verification. Long story short, puts more data inside Merkle tree leaves hashes, so that allows for more data to be proved with a single commitment.
2. Auxiliary proof system arithmetization-specific Mina state proof verification circuit for the proof generator: https://github.com/NilFoundation/crypto3-blueprint/issues/16 (yeah, I know, the PR’s name is misleading). This basically puts together the umbrella Kimchi proof verification circuit implementation.

Chainsafe – Lerna Jabourian, Project Manager

MVP Updates

We are currently working on supporting manifest v3 for the Mina web node. At the moment, it works only with Chrome Canary due to a bug. We plan to release the web node as an extension on the Chrome app store, once the required APIs are stable. For a quick demo, here’s a link to the current state of the web node which can display the list of peers from mainnet https://mina-web-mvp.vercel.app/. As part of our MVP work, a graphql API interface is also under development. 

Serialization

We’re working on finishing more parts of the serialization deserialization of blocks, specifically the TransactionSnarkWork and StagedLedgerPreDiffOne that has recently stabilized after changes from Mina ecosystem partner o1Labs. We have also added support for deserialization of OCaml polyvariant types. This was the last piece required to be able to deserialize & serialize all blocks from mainnet. We’ve also been working on revamping our tests and overall quality of life improvements. In addition, we have also updated our crypto-related components with stable types from the proof systems library and have been working towards getting transactions working.

As always, we welcome feedback and reviews:

Github: https://github.com/ChainSafe/mina-rs/issues
Mina’s Discord: #Chainsafe-rust-client channel
Chainsafe Website: https://chainsafe.io/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChainSafeth 

o1Labs – Emre Tekisalp, CEO

zkApps & o1js (formerly SnarkyJS) 

To enable easy programmability of zkApps, we’re finishing work that will enable developers to use the Mina zkApp CLI to deploy a zkApp to Berkeley QANet. All the components of o1js (formerly SnarkyJS) and zkApps have been worked on in isolation and during ETHAmsterdam we deployed and interacted with the first zkApp created entirely with o1js (formerly SnarkyJS)! 

We’re also working to document recommended best practices for a developer to include their zkApp’s smart contract within their UI, and how to connect their zkApp to browser-based wallets, such as AURO wallet. 

Improving Node Stability 

The latest Mainnet Stable Release 1.3.0 has been out and running for about a month. Many performance improvements were shipped in this last stable release; feedback from node operators and community members has been positive and they have noticed a marked increase in stability and performance under load. We are continuing to work on more improvements which will be included in additional 1.3.x releases in the near future. 

Berkeley QA Network 

The Berkeley QA Network is ongoing and the QA Task Force is diligently participating and helping us address issues that occur. If you would like to participate in the QA network please chime in on the #devnet channel on Mina’s Discord. We plan to make a few more redeployments to the QA network in the coming weeks so look out for more enhancements and fixes.

Major PRs in the last month:

• https://github.com/MinaProtocol/mina/pull/10674 – enable snarkyjs to generate zkapp transactions
• https://github.com/MinaProtocol/mina/pull/10267 – merge snarkyjs into develop, reconciling many earlier inconsistencies
• https://github.com/MinaProtocol/mina/pull/10405 – enable mina-signer to sign zkapp transactions
• https://github.com/MinaProtocol/mina/pull/10652 – fix a bug that made mina-signer signatures incompatible with the qanet
• https://github.com/MinaProtocol/mina/pull/10580 – Add e2e test where snarkyjs creates zkapp transactions that are sent to a Mina node and successfully applied
• https://github.com/MinaProtocol/mina/pull/10189 – important step for adding token support

ONTAB – Behzad Malek, CEO

ONTAB is working on the updated Uptime Tracker for the Mina Foundation Delegation Program. Most recently, we have implemented V3 of the stateful verifier for SNARK workers’ uptime and are performing sanity checks this week. In the previous phase, we developed the stateless verifier for SNARK workers.

We started involving the Mina block producer community in the #uptime-qa channel on Mina’s Discord to collect logs from the nodes that are running SNARK workers, in order to perform sanity checks and acceptance testing. We would like the community also to review the SNARK worker tracker’s logic for any improvements or alignments before this goes live, and any feedback is welcome on the Github repo. 

AURO Wallet – niuniu | Bit Cat#9001

Community contributor and Genesis Founding Member niuniu | Bit Cat#9001 has created AURO Wallet, which is available as a browser extension and as a mobile application to send, receive, and stake MINA and view transactions. Recently, AURO Wallet has included Ledger X hardware wallet support.

Other milestones that we are working on include:

1. New UI design: AURO Wallet is working on a new UI design, which will be more simple and easy to use
2. Supporting zkApp signatures: In order to support zkApps, the functions required by zkApps are currently being developed.

Github: https://github.com/aurowallet/auro-wallet-browser-extension/pull/12 

Minanodes.info – whisperit#8145

Created by community contributor and grant recipient whisperit#8145, Mina Nodes Info was created to give an approximation of Mina Protocol’s network size, to have an idea of which hosting providers are the most popular, and to have a visualization on a map. It started as a one-time project, but the response was great on Mina’s Discord, so it would be fair to say, the community has motivated me to learn new things and to create this project.

The total number of unique visitors in the last 30 days is more than 1K – this, I think, demonstrates one of Mina’s core values, curiosity! The community has always been supportive and I’m glad people are using it. I haven’t had as much time lately, unfortunately, but the project is working autonomously and the data is being collected. I plan to use it in the future and add more stats. 

MinaBoard – Savaş YILDIRIM#1194

MinaBoard is a system that allows you to track all your assets in the Mina Ecosystem and also allows you to track all your assets in 99 different currencies, developed by community member and grant recipient Savaş YILDIRIM#1194. 

After a long work, we completed the design of MinaBoard. We started coding with a user-friendly interface. MinaBoard has completed the infrastructure tests and is being updated to have a better interface. Now you can see all your wallets on a single screen and receive notifications by e-mail or push notification when there is activity in your wallet. You can see more screenshots of the WIP on Discord. We were happy to see that during the testing phase, 927 wallets were tracked with MinaBoard.

Everstake – Alina Tielnova, Segment Lead

Everstake is a staking-as-a-service platform and we are an active block producer on Mina Protocol. We are an experienced company of blockchain enthusiasts and engineers that strive to develop the blockchain space. Everstake has been launched for over 4 years, with 4 years of successful validation, development of various products for the crypto space, and thousands of satisfied users. Furthermore, Everstake is one of the Genesis Founding members of Mina Protocol. 

We are active block producers of the network and are always ready to help the Mina community and ecosystem. Apart from being tech specialists, we are trying to understand the non-technical community. For example, in the Everstake blog, we are trying to create straightforward content about Mina, explaining some difficult technical concepts using simple language. Moreover, we understand that not everyone knows English, and thus, we translate our materials into different languages so that everyone can learn more about the amazingness of Mina Protocol! 

In addition, we have made a Mina webpage where users can get acquainted with Mina, calculate their possible staking rewards, check details of the Everstake block producer and monitor the statistics. You will find an extensive FAQ section with easy explanations on the Mina web page, and delegators can also find staking guides to all possible wallets supporting MINA and all educational content about Mina Protocol. And this is only the beginning of our journey!

The work we’re doing in the Mina ecosystem is quite diverse, from helping with network stability and security by means of network validation, to community engagement by means of creating different content about Mina, to explaining complex topics which will help an ordinary Mina community member better understand the ecosystem and what it’s about.

You can always contact us in our Telegram group if you have any ideas or comments – https://t.me/everstake_chat.