On June 19, 2025, Josh Cincinnati and Brandon Kase, CEOs of Mina Foundation and o1Labs hosted a community call to share updates on the ongoing transition, product priorities, and the long-term vision for Mina. Due to technical difficulties, the X Space was not recorded, but you can find a recap of what was discussed and answers to the questions submitted by the community below.
Transition Update
The transition between Mina Foundation and o1Labs is now entering its final stages. While there have been some delays, most of the legalities and financial elements are now locked in, contracts have been signed, and the final handover to o1Labs is being finalized.
This shift isn’t just about organizational changes. It’s about resetting expectations and putting Mina on a focused, sustainable path for long-term success.
In addition to the engineering and technical roadmap, o1Labs is taking ownership of the following core functions:
Community & ecosystem
Wallets & exchange support
Marketing & communications
Grants program
Delegation program
To support this, Mina Foundation is providing funding for one year of ecosystem development and grant spend, along with a two-year runway for the team members moving over to o1Labs. The responsible employees for these programs at the Foundation are joining o1Labs to ensure a smooth transition.
Priorities for Mina Foundation
Mina Foundation’s focus moving forward will be the design and deployment of a decentralized treasury, built hand-in-hand with the community. The goal is for all future grant and ecosystem funding to come directly from this treasury.
The treasury will be governed by token holders through a transparent, on-chain voting process. An MVP is expected by the end of 2025, with additional iterations to refine the process and eventually remove any remaining safeguards.
In addition to the negotiations with o1, over the last several months the Mina Foundation scaled down tremendously to preserve significant capital to deploy to theon-chain treasury, providing the community a more direct voice in allocating resources.
Priorities for o1Labs
With broader ecosystem responsibilities transitioning over, o1Labs is focused on building tighter feedback loops between the community, engineering, and marketing teams. The goal is to ensure decisions are made with and for the community.
For the core functions o1Labs will be responsible for, the priorities are:
-
Marketing & Communications: While we have been quieter on marketing and communications as we’ve been working through the transition, but we will be amping up our efforts here, with a focus on better positioning and amplifying Mina moving forward.
-
Community Growth & Engagement: Community has always been and remains an important and arguably best part of Mina’s ecosystem. We want to be more transparent and engage with our community more starting now, and also commit to supporting key ecosystem projects that demonstrate the power of zero-knowledge proofs and Mina’s capabilities, such as: Silvana, zkNoid, zkUSD, Nori, and others.
-
Developer Tools: A dedicated team will focus on growing adoption of the most production-ready tools and working directly with developers to overcome technical challenges. This includes wallets, exchanges, and other platforms where users interact with Mina.
-
Engineering:
- Fall Upgrade: the first MIP was published for community feedback and review weeks ago. The next two MIPs will be published soon.
- Building and maintaining o1js for the long term, with the goal of developing a performant, best-in-class zkDSL that enables developers to express complex business logic in a streamlined way.
- Protokit: Mina Foundation is providing financial support to finish and ship Protokit. While it remains a priority, it is not the highest impact item so it’s not something we are tackling first.
Mina Direction
Rather than treating Mina as a monolith, developers are encouraged to approach it as part of a modular stack.
Builders don’t need to wait for new infrastructure to go live. Developers can build with Mina today for example using Browser/NodeJS execution environment to build with o1js, or settlement of recursive proofs
You can find more on the new “building with Mina” vision from Brandon here.
Q&A -
1. What are the project’s goals for 2025?
At a high level:
- Build tight feedback loops with the community, supporting developers and non-developers alike, and empowering more community leaders.
- Make the “with-Mina” stack clear and compelling for developers.
- Highlight the parts that work today:
- o1js in browser/Node.js environments
- Proof settlement on Mina’s recursive layer
- Leveraging zkApp events and actions
- Expand the stack gradually: new components will be prioritized based on real-time community feedback.
- Ship the fall upgrade
2. After 5 years of development there’s still a lack of usable zkApps. Why is this?
The ZKApp platform upgrade has been released on Mina for less than one year. In that time, we realized through feedback with devs that it’s a mistake to treat Mina as a monolith and instead Mina should be treated as a stack, which is where the building WITH Mina has come from. There are many teams that have figured this out on their own which is quite a feat. I expect when we do a better job of continuing to tell the story that MINA is a stack, MINA is not a monolith, you build with me now, not on me now. This coupled with more clear documentation and more examples will help devs ship applications faster. At the end of the day, there is a bunch of stuff in the pipeline, there are usable prototypes, we’re going to do our best to support them and get them out whenever they’re ready.
3. There’s a lack of communication from MF/O1 and visibility of figurehead (s) fighting for Mina, and no exciting marketing ideas. How are you going to change this?
o1Labs are making communication and feedback loops the number one priority for the company. Not just for the marketing or community team, but for everyone. The way this shows up is more communication, more visible figureheads, and more community-focused thinking from every single person in the company.
4. What are we doing to improve Mina’s performance to make apps more user-friendly?
Beyond new execution layers (for instance, the o1Labs team saw an amazing demo of Zeko’s testnet just last week), we are working to tackle performance on the L1. The hard fork in the fall will be the first step and many more to come after.
5. What about partnerships?
We’re in favor of working on meaningful partnerships that result in real projects and outputs, such as the one with Celestia, led by Geometry Research. This integration is now fueling the SP1 proof conversion which makes Nori’s work possible.
We want to reiterate that o1Labs will not waste time on any meaningless partnerships just to make noise. If you feel like you have a great idea for a meaningful partnership that can result in a really good project, then please share!
6. There have been several third party studies about tokenomics on Mina. What are the plans for adjusting the tokenomics?
o1Labs will be helping coordinate and deploy any community-directed changes to tokenomics to make the treasury (and Mina) long-term sustainable. The recent report conducted by Economics Design has been published and is a resource for the community to use and take into consideration for proposals, if they wish. o1Labs would welcome a community member to step forward to represent the community and work with o1 to make tangible progress, and our team has been talking to community members about this. o1Labs doesn’t claim any particular expertise in tokenomics, but will of course provide coordination support and technical input on the potential impact (to security, consensus mechanism, etc.) of any proposed changes.
7. Mina could benefit from DeFi. Is the team supporting third party efforts, like marketplaces, and will they step in if those third parties can’t deliver?
o1Labs would consider stepping in to do something if it became the highest priority. And as a reminder, you can influence that by giving your feedback! At the moment, o1Labs is not actively stepping in and doing that, but basic DeFi infrastructure is being built by community contributors - such as the ZK stable coin by Fizk - which we are supporting We believe that there’s not going to be a sophisticated DeFi ecosystem on Mina, it doesn’t make sense and it’s not the right place for it, at least not right now.
8. What kind of plan do you have to regain the trust of the existing community and convince new people to believe in the project again?
As mentioned earlier, the number one priority for o1Labs is the community. We want to do more listening, more feedback and more active engagement with the community and stakeholders.
Mina will be one of the greatest communities in the space, we’re confident of that. We have a strong developer base, with some of the greatest minds in web3, and we’re going to do everything we can to support them, and bring in more. We’re also going to improve our marketing and communications to support these goals and help the audience understand what Mina is, and what can be done with Mina in the coming months.
9. Last year Mina Foundation launched a community content program. Can you talk more about this program and what the results were?
The content creator program was launched by Mina Foundation late last year, and had some good results:
- 100 content submissions were made by 20 content creators in 6 languages.
- These reached a total of 732,000+ organic views, 6,945 likes, 1,102 retweets and 418 comments.
- Key topics included the Mina-Ethereum Token Bridge, infra tools like ZKON’s zkTLS, zkApps like Dinodex, Tileville and some other topics like Aligned Layer airdrop, Coinbase50 Index, CMC100 Index, roadmaps…
There are still many community members across the ecosystem who create great content about Mina, and we welcome ideas from the community on how to better support and showcase community-created content!
10. When creating a roadmap, it’s reasonable to provide an estimated timeline for ongoing work. However, we’ve seen delays in deliverables a lot in the past. Why isn’t the team more transparent about this?
We’re dealing with really complex technology, with a lot of dependencies. We’re aware we’ve overpromised in the past, but have been working to ensure that roadmaps are reasonable and realistic.
o1Labs shared a 1-year roadmap in December, a lot of which has already been delivered:
- Finished and released: dynamic array access & lookups, zk program quality of life, EdDSA primitive in o1js, o1js v2.6.0, build process and CI improvements, removed o1js-bindings as submodule.
- The team has also partly released: lazy memory mode and o1js API 2.0.
- Things that weren’t on the roadmap have also been delivered!
Mina Foundation also shared product priorities late last year, most of which have now been delivered on or are being worked on.
Now that o1Labs is in the lead, we will continue to work to keep the community more informed about the roadmap, and in particular highlighting potential delays.
11. What happened to projects like ZkNoid and ZKON? Are grants still available for these types of projects?
o1Labs is doubling down on supporting key ecosystem projects that demonstrate the power of zero-knowledge proofs and Mina’s unique capabilities. They will be taking an active role in supporting and growing the adoption of important ecosystem projects that will unlock use cases, amongst them is ZkNoid. Mina Foundation is also providing 1 year of grant and ecosystem growth spend to o1Labs as part of the transition to continue supporting builders.
12. Why haven’t you had any developer job openings for a long time? Have you downsized your developer workforce?
o1Labs has never done any downsizing with their developer team, not once in the history of o1Labs. They’ve hired many developers in the past 12-18 months and have an efficient pipeline for hiring engineers. The team actually is growing now with some engineers from Mina Foundation transitioning over.