State of the Mina Ecosystem: What’s Next?

Today’s digital world is teeming with challenges. Data silos and misinformation abound, while the rise of AI and deep fakes erodes trust. Traditional blockchains, despite their promise, struggle with scalability and efficiency.  

Yet, amidst this landscape, Mina Protocol emerges as a new system that counteracts these challenges— where developers are coming not only to bring privacy to Web3 applications, but are also leveraging Mina’s unique ‘proof of everything’ feature to create entirely new classes of apps.

No, it isn’t in its final form yet – it will continually evolve – the key point is that it’s built from the start with the right architecture to sustain these projects over time.

Where We Are Today

Mina Protocol has already made significant strides. It stands as the world’s lightest blockchain, a revolutionary advancement in an industry often plagued by bloat, centralization, and inefficiency. The first major milestone was its mainnet release in 2021, which introduced a blockchain capable of maintaining a full proof of its state in just a few kilobytes. This allowed for unprecedented accessibility and state verification speed, setting Mina apart from its contemporaries.

Now, with the Berkeley upgrade, Mina has become the first ZK Layer 1 (L1) platform with ZK programmability. This upgrade opens the door to a variety of applications that leverage zero knowledge proofs (ZKPs) for enhanced privacy, scalability, and decentralization. 

Over 50 projects are currently building on Mina, spanning use cases from zkKYC and private voting to zkGames and decentralized exchanges. There are also partners in the community building key infrastructure, including bridges, data availability, oracles, and layer 2s. These projects, once thoroughly tested and audited, are poised to deploy on the mainnet, marking the dawn of a new era for the Mina ecosystem.

What Can Be Built Today

Many of these applications offer functionalities that are unprecedented on any other blockchain today. And this isn’t just a futuristic vision—it’s a reality accessible right now. Here are some examples: 

1. Private voting: Imagine being able to vote without linking your vote to other aspects of your identity. Private voting on Mina ensures your vote remains confidential, sharing only the validity of your identity and vote. All votes are verifiable by anyone, yet privacy-preserving.

Punkpoll, a decentralized voting platform which just deployed on Mina mainnet, is already ahead on this innovation with an existing 75,000 users on Mina’s testnet. Mina is uniquely suited for this because it combines both privacy and scalability. Without scalability, handling large amounts of votes would be impossible. Mina’s unique recursion property enables a ZK rollup of privacy-preserving votes, ensuring secure, private, and scalable voting solutions.

2. Sybil resistant private proof of identity: One of the most versatile and valuable use cases across various industries and businesses in both Web2 and Web3 is the ability to verify the uniqueness and validity of a user’s identity without disclosing any personal information. This feature is a transformative new primitive, enabling secure voting, private KYC, and sybil-resistant airdrops while mitigating the risks of identity theft, fraud, or data breaches.

Idmask.xyz, the first zkApp on Mina mainnet, is already providing this for users in the Balkan states. Meanwhile, projects like zkPassport and Hakata are in development and will be expanding proof of identity solutions globally.

3. Interoperability between private enterprises and public blockchains: Enterprises have struggled to leverage the interoperability of blockchains due to privacy challenges. Mina Protocol overcomes this by allowing selective disclosure of information without compromising sensitive data.

Mirae Asset Financial Group, one of the largest financial groups in Asia which manages around $600 billion in assets, is developing a privacy-enhanced Security Token Offering (STO) solution using Mina. This solution enables secure proof of asset ownership while maintaining privacy and regulatory compliance. 

4. Proofs about Web2 & email state (zkOracles & zkEmail): Bridging the gap between traditional internet services and blockchain technology, Mina enables verification of data from Web2 sources and email. For example, a web3 social media platform can securely fetch and validate a user’s social media data, such as follower counts, engagement metrics, content history and even proof that they attended the listed school on their profile. The zkOracle produces a proof verifying the integrity of this data without exposing personal details. Users can then leverage this on-chain proof to build their reputation in the Web3 space, unlock exclusive content, or participate in DAOs that reward social influence and engagement. With ZKON and zkPass already building zkOracle infrastructures, more developers will soon be able to leverage these capabilities in their business applications. 

5. Scalable ZK Infrastructure: Scalability is a critical issue in blockchain, and Mina uniquely addresses it with its lightweight design and efficient proof system so developers can build high-performing Layer 2s (L2s). Using ZK and recursion, computations are performed off-chain and rolled up into Mina’s “proof of everything,” enabling horizontal scalability. 

While optimizations to the L1 are underway to improve transactions per second (TPS), Mina’s unique design makes TPS an irrelevant metric for its speed and efficiency. This is because Mina zkApps move smart contract execution off-chain, eliminating the need to sync back to the L1 after every step. Multiple projects like Hazook, Protokit, and Zeko are also already in development, facilitating the creation of zkRollups. 

6. DeFi, DAOs, NFTS: Mina not only supports traditional blockchain applications like DeFi, DAOs, and NFTs but also enhances them with its inherent ZK features. Developers can build these foundational crypto applications on Mina while seamlessly integrating privacy and scalability enhancements.

With the Berkeley Upgrade, Mina’s mainnet has the core features to support all of these use cases. The next steps are about supporting builders to launch on mainnet, helping more developers onboard, and improving the tooling on mainnet to further support these new use cases.

The Path Forward: Technical Next Steps and Developer Guidance

With the Berkeley Upgrade laying a robust foundation, the current phase involves several technical next steps. Ensuring network stability remains a top priority, but the focus will increasingly shift to supporting the successful deployment of zkApps on mainnet starting this year. Here’s a closer look at the path forward: 

1. Appchain Readiness: L2 and smart contract layers like Zeko and Protokit are key components of the Mina ecosystem, providing essential tools for zkApp developers. Accelerating their development, auditing, and testing will be crucial for enabling a seamless developer experience. 

2. Rigorous Testing and Auditing of Community Apps: While the core protocol has undergone extensive testing, individual applications are responsible for undergoing rigorous testing and third-party audits. Existing developers are highly encouraged to launch on Mina Devnet in order to start engaging with users and getting real-time feedback. Moreover, other applications and infrastructures should also conduct automated tests, along with paid third party audits. 

New developers that require high throughput and concurrent users should build and test on an L2, while any low throughput apps or L2s should be built on the L1 with o1js.

3. Auditing zkApp Wallets: Current zkApp wallets still need to undergo third-party auditing before any application integrates and launches with them. Every wallet should be thoroughly audited by third-party security firms to identify and mitigate any vulnerabilities. This rigorous auditing process will help safeguard user assets and enhance overall ecosystem security. With that being said, please do your own research before interacting with any live wallets or apps.

4. Development Standards: Establishing development standards, including a token standard and an attestation standard, will provide developers with clear guidelines to ensure consistency and security in their designs. 

5. Infrastructure Enhancements: Supporting projects like the OpenMina web node, bridge projects, and protocol improvements will further strengthen the ecosystem. Mina’s Data Availability (DA) Layer and zkOracle offerings are also pivotal components that will enhance the functionality and interoperability of zkApps.

6. Community and Ecosystem Alignment: Collaboration and alignment with community contributors are essential. Ecosystem participants are expected to have calls with community contributors to ensure all infrastructure enhancements in the pipeline are prioritized to align with the community’s most pressing needs. There will also be governance processes proposed to support certain processes along with regular virtual gatherings like the monthly Illuminate Town Halls, fostering open discussions and providing updates on key developments.

7. Exploring Novel ZK Implementations for Innovative Use Cases: The community is actively exploring innovative applications for ZK such as ZK machine learning, verified content, and zkSQL, to push the boundaries of what’s possible on blockchain. For instance, zkML allows us to securely utilize large machine learning models on-chain, enabling smart contracts to make decisions based on insights from advanced language models. This research phase aims to integrate these capabilities into practical use cases where security, privacy, and scalability are paramount.

Where We Are Going: An Ecosystem Connected by the Proof of Everything

The future of Mina lies in unlocking a better, interconnected internet, unified by a “proof of everything” as a source of privacy-preserving, verified, and composable truth. Here’s why this matters:

1. Maximizing User Activity without Decentralization Tradeoffs: The ultimate goal is to maximize user activity on either the L1 or L2 without making tradeoffs. While L2s may not provide direct fees to the network, their settlement transactions to the L1 bundle numerous user transactions, offering a higher willingness to pay and contributing to the network’s economic health.

2. Scalability and Decentralization: Mina’s unique architecture allows proofs of computation to be composed together. This means for example each zkApp can function as a small zkRollup or zkAppChain, efficiently processing user transactions without overwhelming the L1.

3. A New Paradigm of Interoperability: End-user zkApps can consist of multiple appchains, each inheriting the “proof of everything” property. This composability enables unprecedented interoperability, allowing different applications to build on and interact with each other seamlessly.

The End Game: Pioneering the Internet of True Things

In a world where trust is paramount and truth often meddled with, Mina Protocol is pioneering an Internet of (True) Things. By leveraging lightweight, scalable, and verifiable blockchain technology, Mina is setting the stage for a more open and collaborative digital ecosystem. As the ecosystem supports the ongoing development and deployment of zkApps, the vision of a decentralized, truthful, and efficient internet becomes ever closer to reality. 

Join us on this journey to be part of the future Mina is building— learn from the other unconventional thinkers and builders on Discord, apply for a developer grant, sign up for user testing opportunities, or attend the next Illuminate Town Hall.