August Illuminate – Ecosystem Update

The August Illuminate Town Hall, hosted by Mina Foundation, took place last month, offering the community a platform to learn about key developments in the ecosystem, hear from projects building on Mina, and engage with fellow community members.  

You can watch the last one here or read the recap below!

Mina around the world 

The Mina Ecosystem continues to grow, with an increasing number of people working together towards realizing Mina’s potential. Here are some of the highlights from the past month: 

• Copper, a leader in digital asset custody, collateral management, and prime services, enabled custody and staking support for MINA! 
• o1Labs found time between all of their engineering work to attend ZK Hack Montreal, where they were able to interact with a new group of developers, who are now part of the Mina community! 
• After concluding an audit by Veridise, Mina’s Fungible token standard is ready-to-use to create and manage custom tokens on Mina Protocol! 
• Several Mina Foundation team members have been spreading the Mina message across Asia, including a Mina developer workshop in Mandarin at ETHShenzhen, zkConnect in Seoul, WebX Asia, and more!  
• ETHOnline kicked off on Friday last week, with $20k available in prizes for builders hacking on Mina! 
• Evan Shapiro contributed to a paper on using ZK technology to distinguish real users from bots!

These are just some of the wins from this month! Let us know on X if we’ve missed any and what your Mina highlight of the month is. 

Product & Engineering 

In case you missed it in July’s Illuminate, Mina Foundation welcomed the Protokit and Viable Systems teams to the Mina Foundation Engineering department. 

Protokit 

Work has been focused on improving the development experience and performance upgrades, as well as settlements and testnets. The latest Protokit release, 0.1.1-develop.833, brings: 

• Upgrade to o1js: The starter-kit will automatically use the newest version 1.6.0, and  Protokit will now support every new version that comes after that, without a dedicated release.
• Out-of-the-box tooling for developing App Chains and for deploying using docker.
• Performance improvements: tests will run faster and blocks will produce more quickly.
• A lot of bug fixes, which you can read more about here. 

Rust Node 

The team announced the 0.7.0 release* of the Rust-based node, which brings two major updates: 

• It can now produce and prove blocks with transactions natively from Rust.
• The node is able to generate SNARK proofs for transactions and no longer needs to depend on an OCaml subprocess for that.

This release of the Rust Node brings us one step closer to a Rust-based alternative for the official Mina node, increasing the Mina ecosystem’s diversity! 

*Please note that the 0.8.0 release of the Open Mina Node has now been launched on the devnet. 

Community & Grant Programs 

Core Grants

Core Grants is a program designed to address critical infrastructure needs and fund public goods. Once an RFC (Request for Comment) is finalized, it evolves into an RFP (Request for Proposal) stage where Mina Foundation issues grants for fulfilling the RFC objectives. Find a status summary of proposals below: 

RFPs: 

• Tokenomics Study (RFP): has been granted to Economics Design, who are currently working on the first milestone. 
• Wallet provider (RFC-0008) – Proposals for this RFP, which aim to specify a standard for how wallets and zkApps interact on Mina, are currently in review. 

Other updates: 

• Fungible token standard: has concluded an audit by Veridise and version 1.0.0 is ready-to-use. This standard allows for minting, burning, and transferring tokens, adding a new layer of functionality to the Mina ecosystem.
• ZKML:The ZKML benchmarking effort is nearing a conclusion. The next milestone will be to develop a parser to process ONNX files, extract ONNX OP codes, and map them to equivalent gates in Kimchi.  

Read more about the process and participate in discussion here. You can also join the team in Discord for regular Core Grants community calls. 

Navigators

Navigators is a program open to any developer looking to accelerate their ZK projects to production on Mina Protocol. There are currently two tracks for developers to participate in: Growth and Starter. 

Here’s the latest:

• Grant amounts for the Growth track have been increased to 100,000 MINA, and Starter grants have increased to 15,000 MINA. 
• 24 applications have been submitted to the Growth track, and 11 have been funded so far. The first two to deliver their navigator grants are:
  • ZkRegEx: allows you to process strings in circuits using o1js and is blazing fast. This makes it one of the two live implementations in the space (other being circom)!
  • ZkNoid: took on the challenge of building a lottery game on the L1 of Mina protocol.
• In the Starter track, 21 builders have been invited to participate, 3 builders have completed the track, a further 8 have completed and are transitioning to the Growth Track, and 1 participant has successfully moved to the Growth Track.

Learn more about navigators here! 

zkIgnite

zkIgnite is a program designed to support developers with key resources and grants to turn their ideas and passion projects into full-fledged businesses. 

• Cohort 3 concluded in August, with 21 projects submitting final milestones for technical review. 
• After assessment from the technical review team, 17 out of 21 projects delivered their final milestones successfully; which makes an impressive 80% delivery rate for final milestones!

Developer Leaderboard

In July 2024, Mina Foundation launched a Community Leaderboard Program to recognize and incentivize continuous contributions of builders who have previously participated in Mina developer programs, such as zkIgnite and Navigators. 

The initiative offers participants the opportunity to win a 500 MINA grant by generating consistent GitHub contributions (a minimum of at least 10 days of qualified commits per calendar month). 

7 builders were eligible for grants after the July snapshot, and the leaderboard for August has just been published here. 

If you’d like to participate, there are still some open slots! Get in touch with @cristinaecheverry on Discord for more information on program guidelines.

Protocol Governance

Mina Foundation’s Protocol Governance team has been exploring how mass deliberation can support decentralized decision-making, enabling more effective collaboration and improved understanding.

Deliberation is a powerful tool that can help overcome individual cognitive biases and challenge ways of group thinking, all while building trust among participants. 

Check out the latest blog post from the team, which also looks into the different tools available to support deliberation between hundreds, or even thousands, of community members, supporting the Mina ecosystem as it grows! 

If you’d like to learn more about the governance initiatives the Mina Foundation team is working on, check out the knowledge hub here. 

Ecosystem Spotlights 

Each month, teams from the ecosystem join Illuminate to share the latest updates on their projects. 

ZKON

With their trustless zkOracle service on Mina, zkApp developers can integrate verifiable and secure off-chain data into their applications to prove data provenance, data integrity, and multi-party processing. Read more about zkOracles and how they work at: zkon.xyz

AstroMina

You can now easily access all open bounties in the Mina ecosystem. Projects are able to list bounties, and find builders to help with anything from development to design, content and community activities, while builders are able to find work aligned with their skill sets, and earn for their contributions.

Learn more about how the platform works here.

zkNoid

ZkNoid offers developers a modular framework, providing all the infrastructure they need to easily deploy games on Mina Protocol. After ZK proofs are integrated into the game process, it gets listed on the store, becoming a part of the project ecosystem. Learn more and build games here: app.zknoid.io

Join Us

Didn’t get to join the Illuminate town hall live? You can find the recording on the Mina Protocol YouTube channel here. You can also join us for the September edition!