Mina Ecosystem Updates – Jan 2023

Below are some updates on the various projects, tooling and resources the Mina ecosystem and community have worked on recently. 

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 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 Foundation – Lindsay Casale, Sr Director, Marketing and Sherry Lin, Director, Digital Marketing 

The Mina Foundation is helping serve and support the Mina ecosystem, specifically by allocating resources, supporting network health and security, and supporting participants on their path to the Mina ecosystem. 

zkIgnite, Cohort 1

Announced earlier this month, zkIgnite, Cohort 1 will begin on February 15 and provides hands-on support and funding to those wanting to build on zero knowledge (ZK) – from ideation, forming teams, technical mentorship, to turning your proposal into a business with funding and potentially VC support afterwards. The 3-month program takes you from the A to Z of realizing real-world applications and starting a business with ZK. There will be a variety of opportunities, whether you are a developer, a tooling expert, a designer, an entrepreneur, or want to participate in electing which projects receive funding. Signups are still open, join zkIgnite, Cohort 1 now >

On-Chain Voting for Mina Improvement Proposals (MIPs)

Over the last few weeks, the Mina community engaged in on-chain voting on a Mina Improvement Proposal (MIP) to decide whether to remove supercharged rewards in line with the initial tokenomics. This was a MIP proposed by community member garethdavies#4963, with a community call hosted to answer any questions and engage in necessary discussions. 

The voting period started on January 4th and ended January 14th and more than 250 Mina accounts participated. Voting resulted in 98.47% in favor and 1.53% not in favor of MIP1. To view the results, ecosystem partner Granola Systems developed a results dashboard that displays the on-chain voting results from the MIP1 vote.

See an overview of participation in the MIP1 vote below, based on Epoch 45 next staking ledger:

Vote stake:      227613505.41039

Total stake:     994001117.83985

To learn more about the on-chain voting process and upcoming MIPs, please see ‘On-chain voting for Mina Improvement Proposals (MIPs),’ part 1 and part 2 on the Mina blog, and review the on-chain voting FAQ on Mina Research. 

Upcoming Events

📅 VC Chat Twitter Space on Thursday 2/9

Tune in to a special Twitter Space with Fenbushi and Hack VC to discuss why ZK is so interesting to investors today + tips for builders looking to pitch. Stay for the end to see how you can impress during zkIgnite Cohort 1. RSVP HERE to be notified. 

📅 BUIDL with Mina Protocol at ETHDenver 2023

Mina is going to ETHDenver! Join members of the Mina ecosystem at this year’s ETHDenver (both IRL and online) for a series of free workshops, talks, and social events you won’t want to miss. Read more and register for Mina events HERE.

Share Your Feedback

• 2023 State of ZK: Play a key role in exploring the impact of ZK technology by completing the 2023 State of Zero Knowledge survey. Your feedback is important in understanding the current impact of zero knowledge and its future potential. Share your thoughts HERE.
• Ecosystem Communications: Share your feedback on Mina’s ecosystem communications, including monthly updates, quarterly roadmaps, retros and more. What do you like and what could be better? Take the survey and tell us HERE.
• On-Chain Voting Dashboard: Did you participate in the recent on-chain vote for MIP(1)? Share your feedback on the voting dashboard HERE to help us improve it for future votes! 

News & Announcements

• Viable Systems joins the Mina ecosystem to enable anyone to run a web node on a browser! A new proof of concept announced on Jan 26, 2023 shows how close we already are: http://openmina.com. Read more HERE.   
• Mina Foundation announces new board member Marco Di Maggio, Director of Harvard’s Fintech, Crypto and Web3 Lab on January 12, 2023. Read the full announcement HERE.
• Mina Ecosystem is included in ElectricCapital’s annual report with 145 monthly active devs. That’s up 96% from last year and puts Mina among the top 30 projects by total developers. Read the full report HERE.

zkBuilder Profile

Meet the zkApp Builder — Nicolas Diaz

Entrepreneur and developer Nicolas Diaz shares about his projects and future plans for his zkApp on Mina. Read his full story HERE.

Viable Systems – Juraj Selep, CEO

In-Browser Web Node

Viable Systems has released Open Mina, a Proof-of-Concept Mina Web Node (see full announcement here). Since Mina requires neither the complete transaction history nor the entire ledger, this in-browser node requires no proxy for communicating with the chain. The In-Browser Web Node can send and validate transactions directly on a user’s device. This is an incredibly large step towards a fully-realized, truly decentralized blockchain. This is a PoC because it currently only works on Berkeley Testnet with a hard-coded wallet address.

Upon release, there were some bugs that were discovered, and a majority of them have been fixed. Block production and wallet integration are both planned during this calendar year. The source code for OpenMina is available on GitHub here.

Any bugs that are found and reported here are greatly appreciated, as well as any feedback on existing features.

=nil; Foundation – Mikhail Komarov, Founder

zkBridge from Mina to Ethereum

The zkBridge from Mina to Ethereum is delivered (see announcement here), but there are several things that need to happen before it can be launched. These include: 

1. Proof generators pool for the auxiliary state proof to be generated fast, often and cheap enough. 
2. Audit finalization
3. Verifier production deployment after the audit finalization

It is important to highlight proof system commitment scheme batching within proof generator implementation, which speeds up the proof generation (see here). Additionally, a proof market toolchain multithreaded proof generator merge (see here). Last, but not least, more in-EVM verifier modularization is done, which will allow it to support various circuits for the verification (see here).  

Calling the community to help!

1. Proof generators. Mina’s state proof on a Proof Market needs you!
2. Bright minds. Proof generators need your help with proof generation optimization! The average time of auxiliary proof generation is currently about 1 hour.
3. Application developers. Mina’s in-EVM state management application API is waiting for you to start experimenting.

o1Labs – Emre Tekisalp, CEO

o1js (formerly SnarkyJS) & zkApps

o1Labs released o1js (formerly SnarkyJS) 0.8.0! Proving on Apple M-series processes is ~10x faster by working around WASM-related issues that caused memory swapping between M-series’ high-performance and high-efficiency CPU cores. Functions related to comparisons & assertions have been renamed for code clarity (e.g. `.assertLt()` to `assertLessThan()`). `Mina.transaction()` now accepts a public key as the fee payer argument; passing in a private key is deprecated. 

This version contains breaking changes; see the o1js (formerly SnarkyJS) changelog for full details. Developers should upgrade their `zkapp-cli` to 0.6.1 or newer, and any current smart contract projects to use `snarkyjs` 0.8.0 or newer in order to be compatible with Berkeley Testnet.

Berkeley Alpha Testnet

In late December, an “off-by-1 bug” in Mina’s recursion layer Pickles, caused the Berkeley Alpha testnet to halt. A fix for the bug was quickly implemented and released on December 21 in a newly deployed network. Otherwise and since then, the network has continued to operate well, including the deployment and usage of numerous zkApps developed as submissions for Mina Foundation’s zkIgnite Cohort 0.

Berkeley Readiness

o1Labs’ protocol team continues to work on a number of known issues and looks forward to making a major release targeted for late January or early February. This release aims to resolve all known major bugs and vulnerabilities and as such may be considered a hard fork candidate for Mina mainnet (assuming appropriate approval and adoption by the Mina network and community). 

Proof Systems

The low-level Kimchi custom Plonk gates o1Labs’ crypto team has been working on are almost complete and are intended to go out in the next Berkeley release and redeployment. Additionally, a Rust rewrite of the cryptographic back-end for o1js (formerly SnarkyJS), called Snarky (OCaml) is well underway. This rewrite intends to improve the maintainability and auditability of the code, as well as to improve the performance and developer experience of o1js (formerly SnarkyJS). 

zkOracles

While the completion of a two party computation (2PC) for zkOracles represents a significant milestone in the protocol’s development, feasibility of proving zkOracles notarization sessions has been a difficult technical hurdle for the project. Thankfully we believe that we’ve discovered a novel approach to proving these sessions that’s more than 100x more performant than the naive approach while remaining significantly less complex to implement, maintain, and extend. Unfortunately, progress on zkOracles have been paused as we focus engineering resources on upgrades and the redeployment of the Berkeley Alpha Testnet. 

Ethereum Signature Verification

Pending the completion of the Kimchi custom gates for foreign field multiplication, foreign field addition, XOR, bitwise rotations, and range lookups, o1Labs’ crypto team intends to combine these gates to implement proof-of-concept reusable circuits (we call them “gadgets”) for keccak256 hashing and Ethereum-compatible ECDSA signature verifications. We look forward to releasing these gadgets to the o1js (formerly SnarkyJS) team, such that o1js (formerly SnarkyJS) developers can build and experiment with them.

ONTAB – Behzad Malek, CEO

ONTAB has been working on the new uptime tracker for the Mina Foundation Delegation Program. 

We have made a number of improvements to the tracker to be able to track the latest update, manually check the delegations and automatically send follow-up emails, as well as building resiliency to the hosting environment.

zkFusion – trivo#0001

Community member Trivo#0001 is working on zkFusion, a modular zkRollup for Mina. 

Recently, I finished an integration with o1js (formerly SnarkyJS) and added a common interface to interact with the rollup framework from the side of o1js (formerly SnarkyJS). This will allow developers and users to easily access the rollup framework without much additional work. In addition, work continues on processing account update structures and complex transactions.

Mina Explainer Videos – G-Kriptocu#1377

In addition to producing educational Mina Protocol videos in Turkish, I’ve started making videos in English. In addition, I’m now publishing posts on my blog, minatimes.com in both English and Turkish. I encourage English-speaking community members to watch and comment on my English videos.