*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
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:
- zkApp End-to-End (E2E) Testing -This track has already been successfully completed, and we extend our gratitude to all the zkApp developers who contributed their expertise, including: comdex#2801, rpanic#3328, coldStar1993#6265, lstvan#0153, Gordon Freeman#4502, maht0rz#5944, Nicolas Diaz#8708, ckartik#8395, garethtdavies#4963 and Karol#4497. Track 1 focused on developing zkApps that encompassed 9 specific surface areas, such as recursion, smart contract deployment, and call stack composability.
- External Security Auditing – This track is now closed! During Track 2 network vulnerabilities were identified and addressed, leading to a more secure and robust Mina blockchain! The full report and audit findings will be released in the coming weeks.
- Protocol & Performance Testing – Mina’s Protocol and Performance Testing is scheduled to go live soon and will run for approximately 2 months. This track focuses on providing the necessary resources for node operators to effectively participate in the Testworld Mission 2.0.
- Preparation for the Hard Fork – As we progress towards the Hard Fork, this track will commence soon, involving the necessary preparations to ensure a seamless transition. This is especially important for block producers who are staking on Mina’s mainnet. Stay tuned for more information on this track.
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
zkIgnite, Cohort 1 concluded on May 5th with a gathering featuring Mina Foundation CEO, Evan Shapiro, sharing some lessons from a founder. You can watch a recording from the gathering here. Cohort 1 grantees are now building their proposals with support from their assigned mentors. All projects will present their progress to the electors in August.
zkIgnite, Cohort 2 launches on June 14th, returning with zkApp and Dev Tooling & Services tracks, support from Mina zkApp experts, insights and advice from VCs and more. Register your interest for Cohort 2 today.
Mina Improvement Proposals (MIPs)
The voting period for MIP3: Kimchi, a new proof system and MIP4: Easier zkApp programmability on mainnet commenced on May 20th and ended on May 28th. Voting for MIP3 resulted in 99.998% in favor and 0.001% not in favor and voting for MIP4 resulted in 100% in favor. View these results on ecosystem partner Granola Systems’ homepage and learn more about the results in this recent blog post.
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, and review the on-chain voting FAQ on Mina Research.
News & Announcements
- Mina Protocol’s ZK360 event at Consensus 2023 was featured in an event recap by Rachel Wolfson at Cointelegraph, which also quoted Mina Foundation CEO Evan Shapiro, on the importance of Zk-proofs. “Web3 needs both privacy and verified computation. ZK-proofs provide both of those at a time when applications are needing these features to be more effective, decentralized and scalable.” Read the full article here. Additionally, Rachel Wolfson featured Evan on the Web3 Deep Dive podcast episode, What are zero-knowledge proofs and how will this technology advance Web3? Watch below:
- On May 16, Forkcast published an op-ed by Mina Foundation COO Kurt Hemecker about how DeFi can keep out bad apples while upholding crypto’s core ideals. Read the full article here.
- As part of our ongoing work with etonec, on May 25 Mina Foundation announced the completion of a functional prototype to help address existing gaps within the privacy and Web3 compliance space! See the announcement here and an article about the news in CoinDesk here, featuring Mina Foundation COO Kurt Hemecker and Jonathan Knoll, co-Founder and head of strategy at Etonec. Also, watch a short video that explains what a privacy-preserving & compliant payments system would look like. Watch below:
Learn
- Learn about how zero knowledge proofs can give users more control over their digital identities and data online.
- Download this worksheet guiding you how to build your zkApp Project Proposal
Mina Community Creators in May
- You can build your own ZK App using Typescript!🤯 Check out this Zero Knowledge Proof Coding Tutorial | by: Alysia Tech
- What is Mina Explorer and How Does it Work? | by: Daria Everstake
On-chain voting
Mina.vote was enhanced to better support all community account holders to vote by using their tokens or delegating their vote.
MIP3 and MIP4 results have been verified and announced, see the results at Granola’s dashboard.
Florian Kluge, zkApp Developer
Community member Trivo#0001 is working on zkFusion, a modular zkRollup for Mina.
zkFusion
The current focus is on getting a live end to end flow ready to deploy to Berkeley. It includes compiling a smart contract, deploying a rollup contract, allowing users to interact with it, proving the interactions recursively and verifying it periodically on Berkeley. Most building blocks are ready, they just need to be combined and to enable such end to end flow. Once this works, users will be able to deploy basic app-specific rollup contracts.
Juraj Selep, CEO
Viable Systems, a contributor to the Mina ecosystem, designs, develops, and tests software solutions for the Mina Protocol. Viable Systems’ main areas of focus include user growth, blockchain security, and performance. Our team is also responsible for OpenMina, an in-browser Mina node capable of validating blocks.
Network Performance Tools
Viable Systems has submitted a PR for their work on a new ledger implementation written in Rust, which should reduce the amount of memory necessary for on-chain storage. Their current work on a decentralized snark worker aims to reduce redundant snarking on chain, which should allow for higher throughput. This is a WIP, and it is not currently considered for testing on the incentivized testnet.
Misha Komarov, Founder
=nil; Foundation was established in April of 2018 to facilitate and support research and development in database management systems and applied cryptography. With it’s internal teams =nil; Foundation intends to create a tightly integrated set of technologies becoming a basis for secure data storages operating in insecure environments.
zkBridge from Mina to Ethereum
May was mostly dedicated to several things: 1. Figuring out the way to keep up the Pickles/Kimchi verifier circuits updated with the latest o1Labs’ Mina Protocol implementation as those which are implemented currently must be updated to become compatible with Berkeley, 2. Placeholder proof system verifier for Mina’s zkBridge was deployed to Ethereum testnet Sepolia this week. 3. Auxiliary proof generation timings were reduced to ~15 minutes on a Proof Market (with the proper hardware usage).
Emre Tekisalp, CEO
o1Labs is a global and remote company that incubated the Mina Protocol. Our team operates on the cutting edge of Web3 and zero-knowledge-proofs.
SnarkyJS
- Lots of developer experience improvements – a theme we’re passionate about – in release 0.11.0. Notable changes include:
- Provable.if() was rewritten, causing breaking changes to deployed contracts.
- Deprecated methods and properties on Field were removed.
- tx.send() no longer fails on missing signature, fixing the deployment flow of a zkApp from a UI via a wallet.
Berkeley Alpha Testnet
- O(1), MF and all ecosystem partners continue towards setting a new timeline for the ITN. There will be more to share here in future updates.
Berkeley Readiness
- Same as above
Proof Systems
Chunked commitments, which will allow developers to write circuits which exceed Mina’s 2^16 constraint limits, are going well.
Ethereum Signature Verification
Work on supporting ECDSA signature verification inside zkApps continues apace. The core primitives have been baked into the proving system and the SnarkyJS team are working on making these available to zkApp developers.
Matej Sima, Founder
Stove Labs is building a data availability layer on Mina designed to reduce blockchain storage requirements. The team has built a suite of SC libraries, networking utilities, and data consensus tools to seamlessly develop SCs capable of storing large data structures.
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.
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.
