Summary
The previous blogpost proposed a community-led Mina Ecosystem Funding (MEF) process to support longer term, decentralized and sustainable funding for teams providing ongoing services to Mina Protocol.
In Q4 2024, Mina Foundation ran a test of an initial governance process and tooling for MEF with a small group of community members.
This blogpost explains the process run for this first test, the learnings from that test, as well as Mina Foundation’s plans for next steps.
Applying insights from existing programs
An initial experiment involved 14 participants (8 from the community and 6 from the Mina Foundation) who decided how to allocate a budget of $1,000 as donations to charities. The initial design of the decision-making process was informed by learnings from zkIgnite, Navigators and Core Grants.
Process roles
One insight was to ensure that there were assigned reviewer roles with dedicated time to reviewing proposals and providing any insights on potential risks and benefits. Consequently, the participants were split between two roles:
- Community members. All participants could submit proposals about specific charities to fund; deliberate on everyone’s proposals; and vote on which proposals should be funded.
- Reviewers. At a kick-off call, five reviewers were randomly selected from the participants to provide recommendations on the proposals.
Decision-making stages
Another insight was to clearly separate different stages of the process. Given this, and our learnings from zkIgnite about the roles of different stages, the initial tests consisted of the following stages.
Research stage
Community members shared initial ideas for wider feedback and to gauge sentiment about whether to develop and formally submit them.
Propose stage
Community members filled in a proposal template developed to guide community members that included sections for motivation, rationale, delivery, and potential risks.
Consider stage
Reviewers validated that the submitted proposals met the acceptability criteria that were developed collectively. For example, in this experiment, the charities needed to be registered in the USA as a 501(c)3 non-profit organization.
Deliberate stage
Community members were encouraged to deliberate on the submitted proposals. This was supported by the Reviewers providing feedback on each proposal supported by the section in the template asking for considerations about the benefits, risk and trade-offs, along with a recommendation if the proposal should proceed to the next stage.
Vote stage
Community members decided which proposals to approve (or not). They voted on the proposals on DevNet by sending a transaction to themselves with the memo field indicating their voting preference. By voting on DevNet, participants’ stake and/or delegation on mainnet would not apply during the tests.
Results stage
The outcome of the vote was to fund the following charities:
- Save Lives with Open Arms
- Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund
- Doctors Without Borders (MSF)
- Donating to Save the Children
- Happy Doggo
- Darussfaka Funding
- MAGinternational
- Fundació Mona
- ElectronicFrontierFoundation
- Conservation Fund
Facilitating the decision-making
GovBot on Discord
The Research stage took place on Mina Research while the Vote stage took place on DevNet. The other stages (Propose, Consider and Deliberate) took place on Discord facilitated by GovBot– a collective decision-making tool that was built with development support from one of the community members (see Figure 1).
| Figure 1 Screenshots of Mina Ecosystem Funding stages on Discord supported by GovBot | |
| Submitting proposals | List of submitted proposals in the forum channel, featuring voting options and a summary of proposal deliberations. |
 |  |
Ensuring the process is followed correctly
We previously introduced the role of governance facilitators to support key decision-making processes and ensure they are followed correctly. This initial test was supported by Mina Foundation’s Protocol Governance Team.
Learnings
Participants were encouraged to share their feedback for improving the process through a dedicated Discord channel, retrospective call and Discord survey (see Table 1).
| Table 1 Suggestions and outcomes to improve the initial MEF process | ||
| Suggestion | Outcome | |
| Adjust timeframes | Each phase lasted one week but this was too short for everyone to participate fully due to their other commitments. | Each phase will be extended to 2 weeks. |
| Adjust roles | Five reviewers seemed insufficient since some participants weren’t able to participate fully. | The number of potential reviewers will be increased. |
| Ensure reviewer experise | One insight from other grant programs was to ensure having reviewers with the right credentials reviewing proposals. | Suitability criteria for expert reviewers will also be needed. |
| Adjust review criteria | The initial tests focused on donating to charities. But community projects will require more detailed assessment, including broader needs. | Adjust proposal template to include feasibility and success criteria. |
| Adjust funding options | Another insight from other grant programs was only to fund projects aligned with community needs and values. | Include an option not to spend all funds in a funding round. |
| Simplify voting | In this test each proposal required a separate yes/no vote. A further insight from other grant programs was to include less demanding voting for proposals. | Ranked mechanisms for voting will be added. |
| Simplify user experience | Participants were confused when they needed to move across multiple Discord channels and external platforms (MinaResearch, Google Docs and a custom website for voting). | The number of channels and dependencies on multiple platforms will be minimized. |
| Simpler process | Participants were sometimes confused about what exactly they needed to do at each step, and expected to do at the next one. | The process will be simplified with better documentation and possible in-tool indication of their current position in the process. |
| Optimize overall performance of the process | The initial test involved a Proof of Concept so it had not been optimized beforehand, and the software had slow performance in some cases. | Improvements on the backend of the GovBot, such as better database structures and more efficient communication between different backend services. |
These learnings will inform the next versions of MEF testing (see Figure 3).
| Figure 3 Developing the decision making processes for MEF following initial test and feedback | |
| Figure 3a Decision making process for the initial test | Figure 3b Possible process for the next test |
 |  |
Get involved!
For the next step, we plan to run a further, wider test of this MEF process where funds will be provided to teams that are providing public goods on Mina Protocol. We will then collect feedback towards further iteration.
We expect this will require 1-2 more rounds of iteration and feedback for the process to reach a point where it is functioning well with positive feedback so that a formal Mina Improvement Proposal (MIP) could be submitted for implementing the MEF process fully on-chain.
We are keen for community feedback about these proposals, so please share your thoughts and comments in this thread on MinaResearch.
And if you would like to be involved in the upcoming tests, please register here.
Thank you everyone in the community for your time and effort in building it to where it is today. We are really excited to develop funding processes with the community that can unlock the full decentralized potential of the Mina Protocol. Let’s go!
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.
