Summary
Over the last few years, the Mina Ecosystem has grown substantially so that more people are working together towards realizing the Mina Ecosystem’s potential: unlocking zero knowledge proofs to verify data from any application easily, privately, and securely.
A growing number of companies and individuals are joining and contributing to the ecosystem. As of April 2024, there are around 160 active block producers (data cited from MinaExplorer), over 70 different teams brought in over the last 4 cohorts of zkIgnite (cohort 0, cohort 1, cohort 2, cohort 3), according to the 2023 electric capital report over 170 developers working on Mina Ecosystem (over 80 of which are full-time), and there are several established companies working on Mina Protocol. We expect this to only increase after the protocol upgrade.
Consequently, there is also a growing need to develop Mina Protocol’s governance and decentralized ecosystem funding to support this growth and thereby help realize Mina Protocol’s vision of a future powered by participants.
The success of the Mina Protocol’s governance will ensure that all key stakeholder groups in the Mina Ecosystem have a voice, agency, and support to participate in the most empowering ecosystem in the industry. Getting governance for the Mina Protocol right may also have a broader impact due to the potential impacts of zero knowledge on individual privacy and global economic and political freedoms.
Mina Foundation has established a team to work on how we can support Mina Protocol’s governance. This blogpost shares our thoughts on how the Mina Foundation proposes to do this in line with what has already been identified on Mina Protocol’s product roadmap:
First, we propose what could be the goals of Mina Protocol’s governance. To realize Mina Protocol’s vision of a future powered by participants, its governance should be both:
- Effective so that it delivers on decisions that need to be made for protocol changes and ecosystem funding.
- Aligned so that these decisions meet the wishes of the Mina community.
Second, we propose what the Mina Protocol’s strategy could be to achieve these goals. A key question is: how best to configure governance processes to optimize their efficacy and alignment? It is impossible to answer this question definitively at the outset since governance is a wicked problem. Wicked problems are complex with multiple causes and nonlinear dynamics; are difficult to solve since there may be no obvious or clear solutions; and can have very negative consequences if not addressed properly. Instead, an experimental and incremental approach is needed so that the community can iteratively add, test, and improve governance processes and their workstreams.
Third, we propose next steps for implementing this strategy through improvements to existing governance processes, as well as creating new ones. In particular:
- Communication Plan for Protocol Governance Workstreams
- Enhance Mina Improvement Proposals
- Expand Mina Ecosystem Funding
- Add a Reputation and Contribution System
- Add an On-Chain Identity System
Finally, we propose a timeline for these next steps.
What could be the goals of the Mina Protocol’s governance?
To realize Mina Protocol’s vision of a future powered by participants, its governance should be both effective and aligned.
Effective governance
‘Effective’ ensures that the Mina Protocol’s governance delivers on the decisions that need to be made for protocol changes and ecosystem funding. This means being impactful when there are opportunities to do so and refraining from action when that is the appropriate thing to do too.
Aligned governance
‘Aligned’ ensures these decisions meet the wishes of the Mina community based on common values, such as Mina’s CORE values (see Table 1).
| Mina’s CORE values | |
| Curiosity | A desire to learn, know, and understand. |
| Openness | Giving and receiving with generosity and care. |
| Respect | Valuing the worth and sovereignty of all people, including oneself. |
| Excellence | Pursuing our ideals with high intention, sincere effort and intelligent execution. |
Table 1: Mina’s CORE values
Governance Attributes
To be effective and aligned, the Mina Protocol’s governance should possess the following attributes (see Table 2).
| Defining attributes of Mina Protocol’s governance goals | ||
| Effective & Aligned | Distributed | Shares, rather than concentrates, power across participants, including the power to change the rules. |
| Accessible | Makes it easy and removes barriers to participate through education, accessible design, and incentives. | |
| Transparent | Ensures everyone knows how and why decisions are made and can evaluate outcomes against predetermined success criteria. | |
| Responsive | Responds in real-time to the community’s needs and to meet the needs of a changing landscape. | |
| Coherent | Runs many processes and decisions in parallel without making decisions that contradict. | |
| Stable | Learns over time to become more robust and resistant to corruption, exploitation, and capture by a misaligned faction. | |
Table 2: Attributes of Mina Protocol’s governance goals
Types of Decisions
There are two primary types of decisions that the Mina Protocol’s governance needs to consider: decisions about the protocol and decisions about ecosystem funding.
Protocol decisions are questions about:
- What feature upgrades should the protocol undergo?
- What are the rules and processes for making changes to the protocol?
- How can these rules and processes be improved over time?
Ecosystem funding decisions are questions about:
- What should be the process for deciding how funds are allocated to support the ecosystem?
- What levels of funding should be available to support the development of the protocol and ecosystem, and where should this funding come from?
- How should a decentralized treasury be configured and managed?
These are each already covered by two processes. The first (protocol decisions) is by Mina Improvement Proposals (MIPs). The second (ecosystem funding decisions) exists implicitly through efforts currently maintained by the Mina Foundation, such as zkIgnite, Navigators, and Core Grants. Let’s call this process explicitly Mina Ecosystem Funding (MEF).
What could be the Mina Protocol’s strategy to achieve these goals?
The key question is then: how to best configure protocol governance processes to optimize their efficacy and alignment?
It’s impossible to answer this question definitively at the outset since governance is a wicked problem.
Instead, an experimental and incremental approach is needed so that the community can iteratively add and improve Mina Protocol’s governance processes and their workstreams.
It would also allow the ecosystem to test – rather than assume – what configurations of these processes work best. This can begin simply and gradually by increasing the complexity of additions and tests so that the scope of the Mina Protocol’s governance can grow. We expect that it will take 1-2 years to develop the full set of on-chain protocol governance capabilities with support from the community, Mina Foundation, and other ecosystem partners.
Doing so can build ecosystem capacity, confidence, and motivation to foster wide participation. Together, this approach can help the Mina Protocol’s governance to possess the above attributes.
Learning from historical and more recent methods
It’s important to learn from historical methods that have had the opportunity for wide experimentation.
For example:
- “Benevolent” Dictatorship. Dependability on concentrated power is risky and can lead to failures.
- Minimized-Governance. Lower decision-making capability leads to lower capacity to build public goods and adapt to new challenges.
- Representative Democracy. Concentrating power in a class of representatives is prone to special interests and disconnection from the needs and wants of the people they are meant to represent.
- Plutocracy. Concentrating power in a few wealthy (groups of) people may not align with the longer-term common good.
Two methods that technology has recently made more practical include Direct Deliberation and Algorithmic Coordination. These methods seem promising since they could help to overcome the limitations and risks of some historical methods, such as representative democracy and plutocracy.
Direct Deliberation
Direct deliberation is when a topic has wide-scale participation via techniques, including randomly sampled committees, such as Citizen Assemblies, and mass deliberation tools, such as Talk to the City. Enabled by the internet and AI, these techniques can support larger-scale processes that can be more inclusive than physical meetings or delegating decision-making to representatives. An awesome insight from the surge in recent trials of direct deliberation, such as Taiwan’s digital democracy project, is that regular citizens can reach effective and aligned conclusions when given the space and resources to do so. With these processes, decisions may also be deemed to be more legitimate.
zkIgnite can be seen as an example of these methods. Its grants allocation decisions are made by a cohort of electors sampled from community members.
Algorithmic Coordination
Algorithmic Coordination refers to techniques that support richer forms of decision-making by surfacing more information than is possible with just a straight binary vote. For example, quadratic voting can better indicate preferences and distribute relative voting power.
Configuring Protocol Governance Processes
The next section proposes changes to existing protocol governance processes, as well as creating new ones. These processes could be configured through an iterative, 3 step process.
Mina Foundation’s Protocol Governance Team (including Mina Foundation team members, external advisors, and selected community members) would initially support these processes as protocol governance facilitators.
Any process changes should require consensus via the new category of Governance MIP (explained below).
Governance processes and any changes to them should be described in a structured form in as simple terms as possible while being unambiguous, with each step or component taken through some level of an adversarial risk analysis. Proposals and changes should refer back to how they relate to Mina’s Core Values and how the changes further the goals of Efficacy and Alignment.
Any changes will need to be tested. Some tests can be performed in parallel to the primary on-chain process; for example, trying a new deliberation tool or dashboard.
Others are harder to test without having real consequences. For those, there are a couple of options. One is to deploy the changes to the Layer 1 but only apply them to lower risk problems; for example lower funding amounts or a bounded space of decisions. Another is to deploy those changes to Layer 2 where they can have real impact but also be lower risk than applying them directly to the Layer 1.
Protocol governance facilitators would run retros some time after any process changes. This could include a community-wide conversation facilitated by mass deliberation tools, as well as smaller reviews by committees, to make recommendations on any further changes based on learnings from the retro on the impact of the changes.
For example, after the first On-Chain Voting (OCV), community feedback meant changes were made to the next OCV so that accounts, who had delegated to other accounts, could vote directly without having to first un-delegate. Another successful implementation of retros has been the zkIgnite program where thanks to iterative feedback sessions with participants, new improvements were applied; for example, a scoring system for electors was implemented, a technical review team was introduced, voting criteria were changed, and voting mechanisms were updated.
What could be the next steps to implement this strategy?
Near term improvements
There are opportunities for next-step improvements in 5 areas:
- Communication Plan for Protocol Governance Workstreams
- Enhance MIPs, including mass deliberation and algorithmic coordination
- Expand MEF and source funds from a decentralized treasury
- Add Reputation and Contribution System
- Add On-Chain Identity System
With these changes, the Mina Protocol’s governance could eventually look as follows:
As processes become established, they would be implemented on-chain as Mina Governance (smart) Contracts (MGC) where decision outcomes would be automated and enforced on-chain. These smart contracts would then manage MIPs and a decentralized treasury, allocating funds as part of workstreams and anything else that can be automated.
A more detailed view of the entire governance system will be shared at the bottom of this section.
Communication Plan for Protocol Governance Workstreams
The following two activities would be helpful to ensure that the Mina Protocol’s governance is Accessible, Responsive, and Transparent (see Table 2). Decision making can be impactful by responding to the needs of the community and allowing its rationale to be discussed, including when refraining from taking action is the appropriate outcome.
Open Workstream Meetings
Whereas regular communications already exist for zkIgnite, Core Protocol Engineering Calls would start later this year. There would be 50 minutes for discussion between developers working on the core protocol and 10 minutes for Q&A, in which anyone else could participate.
Monthly Town-Hall Meetings
To ensure regular communication with the wider community, monthly town halls would provide a high-level overview of all protocol governance activities (so that community members do not need to attend all the detailed meetings for individual work streams).
Both the open workstream and monthly town halls would be initially facilitated by the Mina Foundation’s Protocol Governance Team. But the aim is to move towards facilitation by a cross-ecosystem team of protocol governance facilitators who would be selected from the group of governance SMEs and funded by the protocol (see the following section on MIPs for more discussion on these roles).
Due to unfortunate delays in the protocol upgrade, implementing the MIPs that were passed by on-chain voting was also delayed. The plan is to increase the frequency of future network upgrades (possibly to quarterly ones), the timings of which would be communicated at town hall meetings.
Enhance Mina Improvement Proposals
New MIP Categories and Reviewer Roles
To start there would be three MIP categories:
- Engineering
- Economics
- Governance
There would also be opportunities for subject-matter experts (SMEs) to make recommendations on proposals. SMEs would review MIPs in each of their respective categories and make a recommendation before community-wide on-chain voting. This recommendation would help community members when they vote by informing them about what experts think about the proposal, including benefits, risks, and tradeoffs.
To handle a higher volume of MIPs, a subset of SMEs would be randomly selected per MIP (as in zkIgnite). For example, say there were 20 engineering SMEs, then 7 SMEs would be randomly selected to deliberate on each engineering MIP and make a recommendation on each MIP to the wider community.
The SME role ensures that experts have a chance to contribute to decision-making and provides a path for greater community participation in deliberation. This need for expertise means that the pool of SMEs will initially be small; for example, engineering SMEs will be limited to current core developers. However, this pool will grow over time as capacity grows within the community and candidates can demonstrate they have the necessary expertise. Protocol governance facilitators would support these processes.
The MIP Editor group oversees the MIP process. It checks that MIPs are drafted according to the MIP template and correctly formatted and then ensures that the process is followed correctly. This group would be dissolved, and its responsibilities would be assigned to the SMEs.
More Mass Deliberation Capability
Implementing mass deliberation tools could be very useful for capturing the different perspectives across the community. This could support robust discussion between dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of participants to take advantage of the ecosystem’s collective intelligence and make it easy to visualize when there are different perspectives, what those perspectives are, and how they relate to each other.
One particular deliberation tool the Mina Foundation has demoed is Talk to the City. Based on lessons learned from it, Mina Foundation’s Protocol Governance Team initialized a Discord bot to support mass deliberation, sentiment gathering, and feedback summarization. The tool’s first test will be collecting feedback from the community about this blogpost. To participate, please refer to the instructions at the end of this blogpost.
Updated MIP Process:
Expand MEF and source funds from the protocol
In order to function sustainably, the Mina Ecosystem needs effective and aligned funding for public goods that support the protocol.
Funding workstreams
Additional processes are needed to fund:
- core protocol development and engineering teams
- protocol governance facilitators
- other workstreams, such as protocol infrastructure, zkApp developers, and marketing and community projects
Core protocol development would initially be facilitated by the Mina Foundation (like zkIgnite currently is) and eventually funded directly by the protocol and supported by protocol governance facilitators. In this new system it could be achieved via a public process for prioritization leveraging ecosystem engineering and product SMEs.
Sustainable funding
To provide indefinite funding to workstreams delivering public goods, such as the ones mentioned above, and to make the system more distributed, the protocol could eventually adopt an on-chain treasury funded by a fraction of fees and block rewards. These funds could then be budgeted out and allocated to the above workstreams on a regular basis.
To ensure transparency, Mina Foundation’s future blog posts will provide more information about plans for funding and grants and a roadmap for delivering them.
Add Reputation and Contribution System
Another way to ensure that the Mina Protocol’s governance is effective and aligned is to introduce reputation and contribution systems. Building on the experiences with an on-chain leaderboard during the series of testnets leading up to Mainnet, Mina Foundation could develop and administer an on-chain leaderboard that could be used to track and reward participation in the protocol.
This leaderboard would initially reward (1) developer activity (see Navigators program as an example) and (2) protocol governance participation, such as voting on-chain or participating as an SME in the MIP process.
Eventually, this leaderboard could become its own ecosystem-managed workstream to determine what kinds of activities to recognize and reward points to.
These systems could initially benefit from manual, off-chain external auditing to ensure they are not gamed. In the future, they could be automated as much as possible and made available directly on-chain.
Add On-Chain Identity System
Sybil Resistance will be important so that a single person cannot create multiple identities to corrupt, exploit, or capture decision-making processes. This will be especially important in the longer term due to the risk of the advancement of generative AI and deepfakes.
Consequently, identity systems need to be developed. Initially, these could leverage existing identity systems, such as Know Your Customer (KYC) work native to Mina or an implementation of zero-knowledge validation of passports. For example, zkPassport Core Grant proposal considers how Mina wallets could facilitate the use of passport data for web3 applications.
These identity systems could be applied to the leaderboard as part of the reputation and contribution system (to ensure each leaderboard entry is one person) and to mass deliberation tools (to ensure each person only gets one vote). Ideally zero knowledge validation of passports will be viable as a solution that preserves privacy for individuals. If not, KYC could be used. Since KYC is not decentralized, it would be up to the community to decide whether to adopt such an identity system.
In the longer term, this work stream could consider sponsoring grants for decentralized identity solutions, such as leveraging social graphs.
If robust and decentralized, identity systems can enable more democratic, less plutocratic voting, for example via quadratic on-chain voting, and increase the incentives for small block producers to participate in consensus further decentralizing the protocol. Integrating these identity systems with voting mechanisms remains a future improvement that needs more exploration.
Future improvements
Once the above improvements have been implemented, other major MIP improvements could be made at a later date, including:
- automate the MIP process using an on-chain smart contract (as part of MGC)
- add privacy to OCV
- leverage on-chain identity to implement quadratic voting
- an On Chain Signaling (OCS) process to coordinate network upgrades between block producers
Complete System View
What follows is a complete system view of how these proposed changes could work. Arrows indicate the direction of information flowing through the system.
Orange-outlined boxes represent areas that would eventually be built on-chain into MGC, while black-outlined boxes are ones that would be off-chain. Some of the boxes are already implemented (solid outline) while others that we have discussed throughout this document have yet to be implemented (dotted outline).
How to get involved in the vision for protocol governance?
We really welcome your feedback on these proposals to continue realizing Mina Protocol’s vision to empower its users! There are three different options for everyone to contribute:
- Feedback survey – through a Discord bot, more details on how to use it are available below.
- MinaResearch Topic – focused on an open discussion about the blogpost in general.
- Google Doc – to enable dedicated discussions (in comments) about specific parts of the blogpost.
We created a Discord bot to gather your thoughts, and it is available on Mina’s official Discord server. Please follow the instructions below on how to use it.
- Make sure you have access to the Mina’s Discord server,
- Go to the Protocol Governance survey channel: protocol-governance-surveys where the survey is posted, read the channel’s welcome message.
- Click on each one the 3 survey responses. The ideal is that you respond to all the questions presented on the channel.
- Once you have filled in your answers, you will see the Submit button to the right of the bottom of the answer field. Click on submit answer.
We also welcome developers to build the bot further together! Please review the bot’s code repository and don’t hesitate to propose new improvements.
Thank you, everyone in the ecosystem, for your time and effort in building it to where it is today. We look forward to building and collaborating on its next steps!
Timeline for Next Steps
Q4 2023
- Share this proposal with the Governance Focus Group and get their feedback (done!)
H1 2024
- Update the plan based on the feedback from the Governance Focus Group (done!)
- Share this proposal with the community (done!)
- Start monthly town halls for transparency (scheduled)
- MF Protocol Governance Team to propose an MIP upgrade proposal for a new and enhanced MIP process (and MIP template) with multiple categories (initially engineering, governance, and economics) and corresponding Subject Matter Experts
- Start trials of Core Protocol Development Funding workstream (initially managed by MF)
- Start public core protocol calls for transparency
Later 2024
- MF Protocol Governance Team to support mass-deliberation tooling for MIPs
- MF Protocol Governance Team to introduce an on-chain leaderboard with points for governance participation
- MF Protocol Governance Team to propose MIPs for other funding workstreams (eg protocol governance facilitation)
- MF Protocol Governance Team to propose a MIP for a workstream for annually setting protocol vision & strategy
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.
