The Mina community is full of talented individuals across the globe working on the protocol and community. As the community continues to grow, the plethora of projects on Mina grows with it. The Mina Foundation deeply values each contribution made and has made it a priority to reward those individuals whose work keeps the protocol decentralized and vibrant.
Community Grants
The Mina community is now able to shape the outcome of who receives Mina Foundation grants by submitting nominations.
In only 2 weeks, the Foundation received 270 submissions with over 60 unique members nominated for their work. Among them were members creating educational Mina resources, building tools, cultivating community groups, and much more. The Mina Foundation is excited to award new grants to 24 members whose contributions made an impact on the greater community in the last few months. Here is the list of members who are eligible to be onboarded for a grant for this cycle including the criteria used to evaluate all the submissions.
We are proud to have seen a diverse set of projects from all around the world with impressive activity in Turkey, China, Korea, and Russia. The projects ranged from technical tools and scripts to non-technical community contributions like content, events, and translations.
In fact, 25% of nominations were technical like this one by Trivio#0001 for creating a o1js (formerly SnarkyJS) playground to edit and run zero-knowledge code. On the other hand, 75% were community projects such as flushthefashion#5369’s coordination of World Mina Day to bring together community voices or MinaHub’s work translating over 20 articles for the Chinese community.
Along with these grantees are also nine Technical Community Ambassadors (TCA) whose work was vital to launching the network. Now that mainnet is live, Mina is facing rapid growth and has sunsetted the TCA grant program and replaced it with general community grants to be more inclusive. We’d like to thank all TCAs for their contributions and commitment to the protocol, which were crucial in launching mainnet and bringing Mina to where it is today. We are excited to expand the grants program to more people, and as a commitment to decentralization, grants will be rewarded on an ongoing basis to community members who display meaningful work to the community.
Node Working Group
In addition to the 24 nominated grantees and the final TCAs, the Mina Foundation is also pleased to extend grants to the 10 active members who are part of Mina’s Node Working Group.
Every week, node operators from the community who are part of the Node Working Group come together with the Mina Foundation, and its ecosystem partner working on the core protocol, o1Labs, to collaborate on improving the health, security, and stability of the network. Members of this group took initiative in testing new products, providing feedback and suggestions for improvements, helping onboard new technical community members, and more. All community members are encouraged to follow along in published weekly recordings of the meetings.
Congratulations to the community for their tireless commitment to supporting the backbone of robust, decentralized participation. We are excited to expand Mina’s vehicle for grants and look forward to supporting more community-led projects in the future.
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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.
