Moving Mina Forward — An Invitation

After four years of hard work, we launched Mina — the world’s lightest blockchain, powered by participants.

A letter by Evan Shapiro, CEO of Mina Foundation

I want to thank our team, our partners, and this amazing community for making it all possible. From the brave folks that took the leap and joined our first testnets to those that participated in our extraordinarily large adversarial network to everyone that’s come along since — you are the reason Mina made it to launch. You are who we built Mina for.

Mina’s succinct blockchain architecture means Mina stays accessible, decentralized, and sustainable over time — and opens up exciting opportunities to build a secure, democratic, user-centered future that connects crypto and the real world.

To move Mina forward and realize that potential, we’ve got a lot of work to do.

• On the architecture side, we’re exploring how to fulfill Mina’s potential as an open beacon of truth that’s accessible from any location and any device — from browsers to phones to smart homes, and for any user no matter where they are around the world. Through the universal verifiability of Mina, we’re working to build a truly neutral platform for computation, where users are connected directly to the system, with no intermediate entities biasing or gating access through their privileged position.
• On the application side, we’re working to give developers the ability to access zk-SNARKs as easily as they would any other library or programming language. We believe that this new capacity around fully programmable zero knowledge proofs will have a huge, transformational impact on scale, user data privacy, and data verifiability on blockchains. Remember: these are as new now as blockchain programmability was when Ethereum launched.
• And just as importantly for us, on the community side, we’re committed to creating an ecosystem culture that mirrors our values and decentralized technology by putting participants at the center of decision-making and operations.

To get there, some of the O(1) Labs team will be moving to the Mina Foundation, with each team continuing to focus independently on their distinct goals. This transition is underway and slated for completion August 1st.

O(1) Labs, as one of many ecosystem partners, will focus on Mina as a platform and build out the zk SNARK-powered app layer, Snapps, across the full stack — from SnarkyJS to libraries like HTTPSnapps to partnerships with other applications and chains. So the engineering team who brought you Mina Protocol will now be turning their expertise to the application layer. The talented Emre Tekisalp, previously our VP of Business Development and Operations, will serve as O(1) Labs’ interim CEO as the team goes through a governance change to become an employee governed company. You can read more about their plans here.

Meanwhile, the Foundation will focus on Mina’s technical architecture, growing the ecosystem and partnerships, and on serving the community. The marketing, community, legal teams, and I will now channel our passion through the Foundation. I will be becoming the Mina Foundation’s CEO to lead our efforts under this new umbrella. We believe not just in the power of our technology, but in the power of our community. Our intention is to develop systems and structures for increasing self-organization — empowering the community to grow and scale, and putting the people using the protocol at the center of how decisions are made and resources are allocated.

As we turn the page, we’re inviting you to write this next chapter with us.

As we begin designing the Mina Foundation, we’re looking to you — our community members — to provide your thoughts and insights and to help us shape our future. As part of this, we invite you to take a short survey to help map out the future of Mina. The survey will be open until Sunday, July 16 at 6 PM EST.

And for those looking for full-on immersion, both O(1) Labs and the Mina Foundation are hiring. So if you’re into building the future of zero knowledge applications or designing ways to grow and empower the Mina ecosystem, please check out the available positions and consider applying.

Again, thank you for all of your hard work and creativity.

Let’s move Mina forward, together.