Mina Ecosystem Updates – April 2023

*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 or ecosystem partners, whose work is important to the development of the Mina ecosystem and is independent from any of the initiatives that the Mina Foundation is working on.

Mina’s Incentivized Testnet, ‘Testworld Mission 2.0’

Mina’s Incentivized Testnet, ‘Testworld Mission 2.0’, is intended to prepare the community and network for the upcoming hard fork. Below are some updates on the various tracks:

1. zkApp End-to-End (E2E) Testing -Builders from past programs have been building zkApps that cover all new surface areas (functionalities) and testing these zkApps on the Berkeley Testnet as part of Testworld Mission 2.0. As a result, they uncovered some bugs in SnarkyJS and the network. Other engineers within the Mina ecosystem are now reviewing their implementation and testing the submitted applications. Two retrospectives were also held to ensure their valuable feedback was captured and included in the product backlog. 
2. External Security Auditing – The selected external auditor is reviewing the scope around transaction logic and transaction pool. We are expecting the code review to be complete and the associated reports by the end of May  
3. Protocol & Performance Testing – Node operators within the Mina community and beyond were recently invited to participate in protocol and network performance testing, by engaging in a variety of tasks ranging from block production, to SNARK production, to load testing and to archive node activities. Over 3000 applications were received over the course of a few days, and those who are eligible to participate were notified the first week in May. Currently there is work to prepare the network and tooling to start the public testing. The intention is to have the participants of this track start their node operation testing activities in a few weeks, for a period of about 2 months.  

As we approach the hard fork, there will be opportunities for more community members to be involved in Testworld Mission 2.0 – follow Mina on Twitter and join Mina’s Discord to stay up to date. 

zkIgnite

• In case you missed it, 30 Electors from the community reviewed all of the zkIgnite Cohort 1 proposals and voted on which projects to receive funding, resulting in 14 zkApp and 12 Dev4Dev proposals being funded. Read the full recap here. 
• Funded proposals from Cohort 1 were paired with mentors skilled in Zero Knowledge and building on Mina to help them navigate the next steps of building their projects. 
• Outlier Ventures joined Cohort 1’s Week 10 gathering to walk the participants through an in depth guide on how to structure an awesome pitch deck to win over investors. You can watch the recording of the Gathering here. 
• zkIgnite, Cohort 1 held its last gathering on May 3rd and Cohort 2 will be launching in June, register your interest for Cohort 2 today. 

Upcoming Mina Improvement Proposals (MIPs)

MIP3: Kimchi, a new proof system and MIP4: Easier zkApp programmability on mainnet have both moved to the ‘Finalization’ stage and the voting period will be announced soon. For more information about the MIP process, review this blog post.

Events

• As a follow up to the launch of Mina’s multi-year roadmap, Mina Foundation CEO Evan Shapiro discussed the long-term vision for Mina Protocol and how the community will be involved in important decision-making during a Twitter Space on April 10. Listen to the replay here.

• James Strudwick and Dylan Kugler from the Mina Foundation BD team hosted a Twitter Space discussing all things rollups with Mina community member zkFusion – trivo#0001. Listen to their conversation here.

• During the weekend of April 14-16, Mina was present at ETHToyko, offering $20K in prizes for the best zkApps built on Mina using SnarkyJS. Check out the prize winners here and the livestream from the Mina workshop here. Also if you missed it, check out Mina Foundation DevRel Angus Maidment’s costume for his opening ceremony keynote, a nod to Mina’s recursion layer, Pickles. Mina also participated in the United Hacker House around ETHTokyo, on April 13th. This event reached 200+ hackers from across the world and Angus also gave a keynote about Mina Protocol, promoting zkIgnite cohort 2.

• During the week of Consensus (April 24-28), the Mina ecosystem participated in 4 events, including its first-ever ZK360 event, a deep dive into the world of zero knowledge. This all-day ZK event featured panels and fireside chats with industry leaders and experts discussing the latest advancements and real-world ZK use cases. ZK360 featured Mina ecosystem partner speakers, including Mina Foundation CEO Evan Shapiro, =nil; Foundation Founder Misha Komarov, and o1Labs Head of BD Phil Kelly, in addition to speakers from Polygon Labs, Scroll, Starkware, Snickerdoodle, Algorand, and many more. Check out the livestream recording here. Evan Shaprio also participated in YAP Global’s Contextualized event at Consensus, sharing updates about the Mina ecosystem and participating in a panel about ZK in 2023. See the full discussion here.

Upcoming Events

• Mina Foundation is sponsoring and speaking at zkWeek in the Pit, May 15-19 in Chicago! Learn more and apply to attend here. For those who can’t attend, the Mina Foundation team will be on the ground sharing key takeaways and livestreaming Mina’s zkApp workshop on Wed, May 17 from 1:20-2:00pm CT. Check out @MinaProtocol on Twitter to follow along.

News & Announcements

• On April 10, Mina Foundation announced 14 zkApp and 12 Dev4Dev project proposals that received funding from zkIgnite Cohort 1. Read the full release on Yahoo! Finance.   
• On April 26, Mina Foundation announced the results of its annual State of Zero Knowledge report at its ZK360 event at Consensus and on the Mina Protocol blog. Read the full report here to learn about the Web3 community’s views on zero knowledge and its potential impact on the future of the internet.

Learn

Learn about how zero knowledge proofs can give users more control over their digital identities in the online world of video games this video 🎮

What other ZK use cases are you interested in hearing about? Let us know!

Mina Community Creators in April

The Mina Community Blog features a variety of community-generated blogs, videos, articles, and other resources in one place. The submission process is easy and seeks to meaningfully recognize contributors including a 50 MINA* reward for the top Mina Community Creators. 

Check out some of the newest features from April or submit your own content:

• High-level Video Overview of Execution of Mina Protocol by: Kartik Chopra
• How we Utilize CI in Improving the Performance of the Mina Network by: Juraj Selep
• Unlocking the Power of Privacy: How Developers can Leverage Homomorphic Encryption and ZKPs by: Florian Kluge

On-chain voting

Granola has been working on improvements to the Mina Archive Node and have produced an open sourced Mina Indexer. They are at beginning stages and the focus has been on MVP to date.

zkFusion

Rollups function by taking in transactions from a user, sequencing them in a sequencer (a server) and then generating a proof of said transaction (a prover). This end-to-end flow consists of sending transactions across different modules and ensuring that flow works fine, both from a UX perspective as well as a technical perspective. Once this end-to-end flow is finished using local instances, the goal is to ensure the same end-to-end flow works on a live network (including Berkeley).

Network Performance Tools

Internal/network tracing – with our latest PRs being merged into the Mina node codebase, any node operator may optionally send metrics to our OpenMina toolset Fuzzing – we have released our initial fuzzing dashboard, open for community feedback.

Viable Systems is nearing completion of an alternate ledger/storage implementation in Rust. This implementation not only will be less resource intensive, but it will also be a major step towards an eventual full node that can be run on any device.

zkBridge from Mina to Ethereum

This month, together with Mina Foundation, we focused on evaluating the pre-deployment implementation. Mina Foundation has achieved the full functionality walkthrough, this means the verifier deployment step of “The Road to Production” published last month is closer to completion.

SnarkyJS

• zk project [name] 
  • In cli version 0.7.6 the zk project command now generates branded UI scaffolding with links to the relevant docs.

• Blog post incoming
• Fixes released in 0.97 and 0.98

Berkeley Alpha Testnet

• Ongoing updates provided in the various Incentivized Testnet (ITN) Workstream 1-4 channels.
• Most importantly is a number of bugs, some ITN blocking, have been raised during private testing.
• Two updates released and deployed (here and here) during the month

Berkeley Readiness

• Protocol team is investing in tools and processes to complete hard-fork. 
• Post hard-fork planning will kick off soon.
• ITN Track 1 – E2E Functional Testing program concluded on 4/16. This program helped identify a number of bugs with both the protocol and SnarkyJS, and resulted in nine separate zkApps which covered broad swaths of the protocol’s functionality and will be run at regular intervals as E2E tests of the network. 

Proof Systems

Implementation on a key primitive we’re calling “chunked commitments” kicked off in April. This will enable developers to write circuits which exceed Mina’s 2^16 constraint limit at the cost of additional proving. This work is expected to raise the effective circuit constraint limit for zkApps to 2^32, significantly expanding use cases for SnarkyJS and zkApps.

zkOracles

Active development of zkOracles remains on hold at O(1). As a result, there are no material updates to provide for April. 

Ethereum Signature Verification

The underlying gates and the chunking improvements to support both ECDSA signature verification and keccak hashing are expected to be complete this month, with implementation of the ECDSA verification and keccak gadgets beginning shortly thereafter.

We migrated the Leaderboard to a new AWS account based on the data retention policy and applied cost optimizations to reduce the hosting fees despite growing size of stored data (BP’s logs)

Stove Labs is continuing development on a token standard and off-chain storage solution for the Mina blockchain. Their project, ZKFS (Zero-Knowledge File System), enables developers to store large data structures without congesting the network, enhancing blockchain efficiency. 

Additionally, their work on a Mina token standard would provide a standard set of rules and guidelines for developers to create and manage digital assets, which ensures that the assets are compatible with other applications and platforms that support the same standard. This makes it easier for Mina developers to create new applications and services that are compatible with existing blockchain infrastructure.