Since the publication of the Decentralized Treasury RFC in late 2025, substantial progress has been made across the Mina Foundation to move the Treasury from proposal to implementation and bring decentralized governance closer to reality. Following extensive community feedback, an external review from Aragon, and continued collaboration across contributors, the focus has shifted firmly toward execution: delivering the Decentralized Treasury in 2026.
Over the past months, the Mina Foundation team has been deeply engaged in development, security review, infrastructure validation, and regulatory coordination to ensure the Treasury launches successfully.a
Development Progress
A fully working MVP of the Decentralized Treasury has now been built, complete with a supporting user interface running on a MESA-compatible local blockchain environment.
This milestone represents much more than a prototype. The implementation demonstrates the full lifecycle of decentralised governance operations, including:
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Proposal creation
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Community voting
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Vote tallying
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Treasury execution flows
The current system architecture combines smart contracts and zkPrograms working together to support secure and verifiable governance participation.
Independent Security Audits Completed
Security and correctness have remained a top priority throughout development.
To ensure the Treasury architecture and implementation met the highest standards, two independent audits were conducted by zkSecurity and Trail of Bits.
The audit scope included:
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Review of the Treasury’s overall design
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Review of the Decentralised Treasury GitHub repository
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Analysis of smart contract logic
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Review of zkProgram correctness and security assumptions
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Evaluation of governance and voting mechanics
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Testing of execution and tallying systems
zkSecurity Review
zkSecurity reviewed the three smart contracts and two zkPrograms that collectively power proposal creation, voting, tallying, and execution within the Treasury framework.
In addition to reviewing implementation correctness, zkSecurity also evaluated whether the Treasury’s voting mechanism can realistically support enough participants to satisfy governance acceptance criteria at scale.
Their findings were highly encouraging. zkSecurity concluded that:
“Overall, we found the treasury design to be sound.”
The review identified no fundamental weaknesses in the Treasury architecture, and the relatively small number of critical findings reflected strong system design, clearly defined trust boundaries, and thoughtful engineering decisions.
Trail of Bits Audit
Following the zkSecurity review, Trail of Bits conducted a second independent audit.
This review focused on validating key security assumptions and stress-testing critical system components, including:
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Protection of Treasury funds against malicious proposals or exploit scenarios
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Integrity of the staking-to-voting ledger circuit
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Correct alignment with Mina Protocol internals
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Reliability and resilience of the vote tallying process
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Robustness of zero-knowledge circuits
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System-wide behavior and test coverage
Because the Trail of Bits review occurred after zkSecurity’s assessment, the team was also able to verify remediation work and confirm that previously identified issues had been properly addressed.
Remediation and Final Security Status
Any higher-severity findings identified during the audit process have since been fully remediated.
Fixes were implemented, reviewed, and validated to ensure the Treasury system satisfies the expected guarantees for:
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Security
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Correctness
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Integrity
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Governance reliability
Importantly, neither audit identified any fundamental flaws in either the Treasury design or its implementation.
The publication of both audit reports is expected shortly, and the community will be able to review the findings directly once released. Expect a more detailed post (or two) on this in the coming weeks.
Regulatory Coordination with Swiss Authorities
Alongside technical development, significant progress has also been made on the regulatory front.
Because the Decentralised Treasury involves the deployment of Foundation-controlled funds into a decentralised governance framework, the Mina Foundation sought guidance from the Swiss Federal Supervisory Authority for Foundations (ESA).
Representatives from the Mina Foundation presented the Treasury structure, governance model, and operational procedures directly to the ESA.
Following this review, the ESA confirmed that the establishment of the decentralised organisational unit is aligned with the purpose of the Foundation.
The authority further stated that it had no objections to the project, noting that the proposed structure and intended operational procedures are consistent with the Foundation’s mission and purpose.
This may sound banal, but it took many months of communication and coordination to achieve this result, and it clears the path towards deploying the majority of our MINA to the treasury, on the way to the Foundation’s ultimate winding down in accordance with applicable law and regulatory approval.
Looking Ahead
The Decentralised Treasury represents one of the most important steps toward progressively decentralising governance and ecosystem coordination within Mina.
Over the past year, the work has moved well beyond the RFC stage:
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The architecture has been implemented
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The governance flows have been tested
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Independent security audits have been completed
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Regulatory discussions have taken place
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Critical findings have been remediated
The focus now turns toward finalisation, publication of audit materials, continued testing, and preparing for release in 2026.
What’s Next?
Mina Foundation made the decision to target the upcoming MESA upgrade as the foundation for the Decentralised Treasury rollout. As a result, deployment of the Treasury is dependent on the successful completion and availability of the MESA upgrade.
Over the coming phases, work will focus on finalising the remaining feature set and operational tooling required for production readiness, including:
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Ledger support
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Delegation program support
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Treasury lifecycle tooling and infrastructure
The next major milestone will be deployment to a smaller MESA network environment. This phase is designed to allow rapid iteration and validation of Treasury operations in a controlled setting, including:
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End-to-end proposal lifecycles
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Voting flows
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Vote tallying and execution
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Operational tooling and monitoring
Because this environment will operate with faster epochs and a smaller scale, it will allow the team to test governance cycles more quickly and efficiently before expanding participation.
Following this phase, the final major step before mainnet deployment will be launching the Treasury on a larger MESA Testnet environment. This stage will enable broader community participation and provide an opportunity to thoroughly test governance mechanics under more realistic network conditions.
The goal of this phase is to closely mirror real voting cycles and operational dynamics while incorporating feedback from a wider group of ecosystem participants.
Alongside these rollout stages, a final end-to-end audit of the fully production-ready Treasury system will also be commissioned. This review will validate the complete integrated system, including governance flows, zk components, ledger interactions, operational tooling, and deployment assumptions prior to any mainnet release.
As the Treasury moves closer to deployment, continued community participation, testing, and feedback will remain an essential part of the process.
…and When Will We Post Again?
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We understand we’ve been silent for a while — we had nothing to report as we were working through all of this and we know how much the community hates hearing “soon” instead of “it’s done”
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But we want to set some expectations around when you can hear more about these stages, so please look out for these posts in the coming months:
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Detailed audit results and reports
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A more thorough walk-through of the treasury on our local testnet
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A deployment on Mesa Testnet of a near final product (and an invitation to test)
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More details on our regulatory success with ESA and our wind-down plans
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