Illuminate - January Ecosystem Update

Community
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PRODUCT & ENGINEERING

Product update

Last year, Mina Foundation set product priorities which were bucketed into three high-level product objectives:

  • Make it easier to build complex apps on Mina,
  • Build key Web3 infrastructure and standards essential to reach scale, and
  • Support builders in acquiring end users.

The product team has shared an update on where these priorities are at, and what the expected next steps are here.

Core Grants

Core Grants is a program designed to address critical infrastructure needs and fund public goods. Once an RFC (Request for Comment) is finalized, it evolves into an RFP (Request for Proposal) stage where Mina Foundation issues grants for fulfilling the proposal. Find a status summary of development work below and further details on the Project Board:

A series of demos were also hosted on Discord to share progress and insights from current RFPs, including MinaToken’s token launchpad from DFST, and Mina Attestations Standard from the zkSecurity team.

COMMUNITY

zkIgnite

With four cohorts of zkIgnite now wrapped up, we’ve been reflecting on, and celebrating, the successes of zkIgnite. However, based on the experience of running other grant programs over the last few years, the zkIgnite program has been retired to focus on Navigators and Core Grants.

zkIgnite has been great for bringing developers into the ecosystem to collaborate, share knowledge and build together. There have been a lot of learnings about what kind of support is necessary to best enable the iterative, continuous-delivery style development most relevant to the current stage of the ecosystem, so Navigators has now been molded into a design to meet these needs.

Navigators

Mina Navigators, a grant program which aims to support and accelerate teams in the early to mid-life cycle of their projects, has launched season 3 of the program with 2.3 million MINA up for grabs. This season will prioritise grant applications in the following areas:

  • Feeding the proof: onboarding provable data sources using the Mina Attestations standard
  • Use cases for verifiable compute
  • Infrastructure Improvements (Protokit, o1js, proof conversion)

Read more about the program and season 3 in this ‘Request for Startups’ blog post or if you already have an idea, you can apply here.

Developer Leaderboard

Hola! The latest updates for the Community Leaderboard Program are out! :tada:

We’re excited to share the results of the :trophy:January Leaderboard | 2025-01​:trophy:

:1st_place_medal:@Charlie | 18 days of contributions | eligible for grant!

:2nd_place_medal:@berkingurcan | 13 days of contributions | eligible for grant!

:3rd_place_medal:@Yashmittal | 13 days of contributions | eligible for grant!

  1. @dfst.io | 11 days of contributions | eligible for grant!

  2. @Düldül Osman | 11 days of contributions | eligible for grant!

  3. @NeoGar | ZkNoid | 11 days of contributions | eligible for grant!

  4. @illya.papi | 10 days of contributions | eligible for grant!

  5. @satyambnsal | 10 days of contributions | eligible for grant!

  6. @Kaique Anarkrypto | 10 days of contributions | eligible for grant!

:eyes:You can check out the full leaderboard and find more information HERE

:camera_flash: The next snapshot will be taken on Feb 28. To qualify for a MINA grant, make sure you’ve contributed for at least 10 days in the calendar month. Don’t forget to share your GitHub repositories!

:warning:Please Notice that the program will be active until the end of June 2025 :warning:

Want to get involved?

Reach out to @cristinaecheverry to confirm your participation, and you can review the program guidelines HERE

Governance

There was a protocol governance community call in January sharing updates from Mina Foundation’s Protocol Governance team: https://youtu.be/SM21TY1kn-U

MIP5: ‘MIP Upgrade’

The MIP Upgrade has officially been merged and is now labeled as MIP5. This means the community review phase has started, where community feedback is essential.

As a reminder, this proposal introduces changes to the MIP process to make protocol decision-making more transparent, effective, and community-aligned. You can read more about it here:

MEF

Mina Ecosystem Funding is moving closer to the next community-wide test. While the team completes the internal tests and implements final improvements before moving forward, the community is invited to read more about the process and share their feedback in the following MinaResearch thread: Mina Ecosystem Funding - a new funding process for Mina and results and learning from the first MEF tests

Learn about the previous test and its results here: Results and learnings from the first MEF tests | Mina Protocol

Research

As part of the new research series, Mina Foundation’s Protocol Governance team has been exploring how to ensure Mina processes remain trustworthy to maintain confidence in the protocol. You can read the relevant blog posts here:

EVENTS

Mark your calendar for upcoming events:

Feb 15th: zkConnect Shanghai - a deep dive into the latest in ZK technology with industry experts, panel discussions, and a mini hackathon showcase.

Feb 23rd to March 2nd: Find members of the Mina Foundation team at events throughout ETHDenver, including Async House, Proof Point, and zkHub. The full schedule will be shared on X over the coming days!

Feb 28th: zkFriends Night at ETHDenver co-hosted by Mina Foundation and o1Labs, sponsored by ZKM and House of ZK. Join other founders, developers, backers, and projects from the ZK ecosystem to mix, react, and bond. Space is limited, sign up to secure your spot!

March 7th: Mina is sponsoring EPFLs Privacy x Verifiability conference. This conference offers talks, panel discussions, and opportunities to network.

ECOSYSTEM SPOTLIGHTS

We’re counting on you to share your ecosystem updates and highlights! Drop them below in the thread :saluting_face:

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o1Labs is sharing here the notes previously expressed by Brandon on Twitter, detailing our work in progress.

Hard fork mechanism
Our last hard fork process was not smooth, and such a complex upgrade process made it hard to have confidence in its success. Our node operators team is hard at work designing a new upgrade mechanism that will be far more automatic, and far smoother, and that will make it easy to ship important updates quickly. As the team approaches a final design, we will involve the community and seek rounds of feedback to make the process smooth as we build it out. This is an important step in releasing the other changes we’re working on.

Slot time
At o1Labs, we’re currently running an internal testnet to measure performance and identify bottlenecks. We wish it was as simple as just changing the number, but so many things depend on it that we’re working hard to make sure everything works the same! We’ve identified the biggest bottleneck in proving time: Sometimes we pause during block production to store node state on disk, so that we can recover quickly if the node crashes or is restarted. The performance team is addressing this issue now; even before the upgrade, this should mean that nodes become more responsive and more efficient! We’ve also identified some speed-up potential in our hashing and handling of transaction logic. As we improve these parts, we should see the potential slot time move even lower. As we see successful tests with the slot time on our internal network, we’ll be opening up access so that you can connect and verify it yourself. For many zkApps, this will also begin to address throughput issues, making real-world throughput finally achievable.

Node memory usage
Another common issue is the RAM usage of the Mina node, causing high hardware requirements. High hardware requirements = high node operator costs! We hear node operators that this needs to improve: That time is now. A large component of RAM usage is storing proofs in memory. For Mina, we don’t just store the tiny block proof: We also have all the transaction proofs along the way, which can be quite large. Our first step is to write these to an on-disk database, only holding in memory what we really need. This has large knock-on consequences too. For years we’ve wanted to include more transactions in each block, but 128 per block has already driven RAM usage uncomfortably high. With these fixes, we will be able to experiment with higher transaction throughput in each block, in addition to the new higher block rate that we’re targeting with other fixes.

Higher transaction throughput
Caching proofs to the database already lets us go a long way, but we know we can go further. Snark work for large zkApp transactions can be slow, which limits how many we can support in a block. But it’s already obvious how to split them up: we can prove the account updates separately, and our snark work becomes smaller and more consistently sized. Treating each account update as a small transaction could decrease throughput though: we don’t want a zkApp transaction with 5 updates to use up 5/128 spaces in the block. Instead, we’re queuing up this work after the RAM and block capacity improvements, so that transactions really will be more plentiful. There’s more to do on the crypto side too. Currently, we pair up transactions in a “binary tree”, which means that every extra layer of snark work doubles our throughput. We know that pickles can support more than 2 proofs though, so we will be experimenting with 3+ proofs in the scan-state merges. 2^7 = 128 is where we are today, but 3^7 = 2187 for the same delay of snark work. And we know this will be helpful for o1js developers too! As we enable recursion with more proofs, the o1js API will be updated to make it available to all zkApps, in a backwards-compatible way.

Finality
The block time improvements will already help with Mina’s slow finality, inherited from Ouroboros, but we know that we can do better. As part of a shared project between Mina and Project Untitled, we’re targeting a hybrid consensus model, which we’re hopeful can bring us to <10 block confirmations before transactions are confirmed to be truly final. Some details of this already exist in the [Project Untitled] whitepaper draft. We’ll be sharing more on the design as we’re ready to start building.

zkApp programmability in o1js
At MinaCon last November, we demoed the new v2 API for o1js. This exposes much more of the protocol’s design for zkApp developers, letting them better use the features from the protocol in the ways they were intended. This new API has layered abstractions, so you can see how everything works, and choose the right level of abstraction for your apps. An alpha version of this API will be included in the upcoming release, and we’re going to keep iterating on it as we get your feedback and bug reports.

Protocol feature development
As zkApp development using o1js continues, we’ve been seeing a few recurring pain points. The biggest of these is access to the protocol’s state: we’re working to add “historical” preconditions for protocol state so that applications can use Mina’s randomness, ledger hashes, and all the other goodness, even when the zkApp proofs take some time and the chain has moved forward. We’ve also been hearing some feedback on the zkApp upgrade mechanism, and we hear the concerns. One of our upcoming focuses will be finalizing the zkApp protocol API so that we can be confident in supporting it for every future upgrade and turning off the signature fallback. We also have a design for the zkPromise API and protocol feature set, which makes it easier to reason about asynchronous computations that zkApps often encounter. The design for this is already fairly mature, stay tuned for more details! And we’ll be working to integrate it with the finalized zkApp protocol API, to make sure everything works together beautifully. All of these pieces will require hard forks to deliver, so these directly benefit from our work on the upgrade mechanism.

Folding
Another way that we can speed up transaction throughput and allow for more powerful zkApps is folding. The team is making strong progress on Arrabbiata, which will make folding available for the protocol, for o1js developers, and lets us supercharge the performance of o1vm.

[Project Untitled]
Finally, we are dedicating time and resources to [Project Untitled], most recently releasing our whitepaper draft. We know that zkApps today have a state management problem, and we think that this is an important part of the puzzle to solve. With [Project Untitled] and Mina together, more complex, more dynamic zkApps will become easier to build, and some previously-impossible zkApps start looking very achievable. [Project Untitled] has many other synergies with other web3 projects which we are exploring now and expect will help the Mina ecosystem become more integrated with Ethereum and other ecosystems. We’re working on a demo of the cryptography as a precursor to our first testnet, which we hope can give zkApp developers the ability to design these new applications while we work on the protocol.

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Hi everyone, Zeko Labs and Lumina Labs were busy in January. Both were undergoing audits, with the Lumina audit wrapping up and the Zeko audit underway.

Lumina is working with a front-end partner to implement the LuminaSDK and spin up the first public DEX built on Lumina. To launch Lumina on mainnet we need to work with the Mina Foundation to implement native multisig on Mina to protect the protocol security and address an audit finding…and that is the current status of Lumina (Schnorr multisig support · Issue #1971 · o1-labs/o1js · GitHub). The team is working on designing some exciting new liquidity primitives which will be announced in an expanded go-to-market post soon.

The Zeko audit is going well, devnet is back up and running, with improvements to the sequencer and prover. Several apps are busy deploying to Zeko in preparation for the Zeko Boom Testnet Contest, and exciting step toward mainnet launch!

Follow both Lumina (x.com) and Zeko on Twitter to get all the latest updates. Note there are now two Twitter accounts for Zeko, one for Zeko Labs (x.com) and another for the new Zeko Foundation (x.com).

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ZKON February 2025 Update :hammer_and_wrench:

Advancing Verifiable Data & zkTLS Adoption

ZKON continues to push the boundaries of trustless data verification, with significant progress in TrueData zkOracle, zkTLS adoption, and our path to mainnet. Our work focuses on enhancing Mina’s infrastructure with scalable, privacy-preserving solutions for developers integrating secure, off-chain data.

On the technical front, we’ve optimized ECDSA signature handling while evaluating additional verifications for our zkProgram. Development is also underway for a Proof Verifier, a crucial tool that will ensure efficient validation of cryptographic proofs. Documentation updates are in progress, improving transparency on private data interactions and 1TX data delivery—two key features enabling seamless zkApp integrations.

Meanwhile, Eternal Shape has achieved a major breakthrough with long-format post support, overcoming previous limitations in handling large data types within Zero-Knowledge Proofs. Thanks to recent O1JS updates, extended content verification is now technically possible, marking a significant step forward for ZK-powered content authentication.

ZKON & Mina Navigators

With Season 3 of the Mina Navigators program now open, developers have an opportunity to build with TrueData zkOracle & zkTLS while securing grant funding. These solutions provide verifiable, privacy-preserving data flows, essential for Mina’s proof-based architecture. In parallel, ZKON’s zkOracle Network development continues under Mina’s Core Grants program, reinforcing our role in advancing decentralized data verification.

TrueData: ZKON’s Next Evolution

As part of our evolution, the TrueData suite brings a structured and scalable approach to verifiable data across Web3, AI, and enterprise applications. This transition ensures greater clarity, making it easier for developers and businesses to integrate privacy-first, tamper-proof data solutions.

What’s Next?

With zkOracle improvements, growing zkTLS adoption, and our ongoing mainnet preparations, ZKON is entering a pivotal phase. The Incentivized Testnet Program remains active, running alongside Mina Navigators to provide additional rewards for early adopters. As we move closer to deployment, our focus remains on delivering scalable, cryptographic verifiability to real-world applications.

:rocket: Mainnet is on the horizon. Stay tuned!