Alexander

Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here

[Mina Protocol (httpz) 🪶 @MinaProtocol]

Congrats to @ZekoLabs on the launch of Agentic Mainnet! 🎉

As AI agents become more capable, they'll need infrastructure that enables private execution, verifiable computation, and secure coordination.

Excited to see Zeko building this on the Mina stack, leveraging Mina for settlement and verification while pushing the frontier of agentic applications.

[Mina Protocol (httpz) 🪶 @MinaProtocol]

Nori Plankton Testnet Event
NOW LIVE ✅

Become an early ETH to MINA bridge tester:
https://t.co/gMCEeYxEWH

[nori @nori_zk]

📢 Announcing Plankton – Nori’s first testnet event
📅 30 Sept
⚠️ This is not a full public testnet.
It’s an early experiment to validate ETH → Mina bridging.

[Mina Foundation (httpz) 🪶 @MinaFoundation]

As mentioned last week, the Mina Foundation's RFC Phase is done!

Next comes the MVP Phase:
🟣Implement decentralized treasury zkApps and UI features
🟣Release a public devnet demo

For any feedback or questions, please head to the Mina Forum: https://t.co/D5SSq72NSG

[Alexander @AlexanderYud1n]

@flowith Send a code please

[Brandon Kase @bkase_]

From smoother hard forks to protocol performance and features improvements to application-layer redesigns, o1Labs is hard at work on Mina Protocol -- let's do a deep dive into what we've been busy building

We published our team roadmaps late last year, I'll go deep into what we've been building against those in this post. 👨‍💻

You'll start seeing the results in our upcoming release, but we're also working on some larger projects to address some of the long-standing concerns.

Everything we do is open-source. Like everything should be in crypto. No bullshit allowed. You can go deep into anything by following our GitHub activity https://t.co/IEGZRZCSie and talking to us on Discord.

Now let's go deep into what all our engineering teams have been doing.

Hard fork mechanism
We heard from everyone involved with the last hardfork: The process was not smooth, and such a complex upgrade process made it hard to have confidence in the success of the upgrade. Our node operators team is hard at work designing a new upgrade mechanism that will be far more automatic, far smoother, and that will make it easy to ship important updates quickly.

As the team comes close to a final design, we will involve the community and seek rounds of feedback to make the process is buttery 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 https://t.co/JhEW3gk1dz , but 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 https://t.co/ZJSRB2l4cn, 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 https://t.co/JhEW3gk1dz. 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.

And much more
All these things are happening now or soon, but we're also committed to fixing small issues and bugs that come up, and addressing feature request. We'll continue to call the most important of these out in release notes, and you can watch us fixing them in realtime on GitHub if you're so inclined!

For the rest of our plans for Mina and Project Untitled in 2025, you can see our team's roadmaps https://t.co/Kp39oGiQ65 , our draft Project Untitled whitepaper, or engage with our engineers on discord.

Again, everything we do is open-source. No bullshit. If you have questions, ask us. And you can follow our development live at https://t.co/IEGZRZCSie

[Alexander @AlexanderYud1n]

Up to rank 741. #kaggle - https://t.co/bsYf3HXc3j

[Mina Protocol (httpz) 🪶 @MinaProtocol]

The Illuminate January update has arrived ✨

https://t.co/5u6BHfbtxS

Dive into last month’s news and progress from the Mina community!

[nori @nori_zk]

🚀 Introducing Nori: Ethereum State Verification on Mina 🚀

Nori is pioneering blockchain interoperability by seamlessly connecting @ethereum and @MinaProtocol . Our mission? To enable trust-minimised and zero-knowledge (ZK) verification of Ethereum’s state on Mina, unlocking new possibilities for cross-chain applications. 🔗✨

[Mina Protocol (httpz) 🪶 @MinaProtocol]

Mina is proud to be recognized in the CV VC Top 50 Report by @CV_Labs, highlighting the most innovative blockchain projects in the Crypto Valley! 🎊

The report showcases leading blockchain projects and includes insights from @MinaFoundation CEO @khem.

It’s out now! 👇

[Mina Protocol (httpz) 🪶 @MinaProtocol]

22KB

That’s the tweet 😌✨

[Üstad Splinter @ustadsplinter34]

$mina @MinaProtocol ekosistemi hangi alanlarda büyüyebilir?
Zk teknolojisi gizlilik temelli olduğu için özellikle identity ( kimlik doğrulama) vs alanında ciddi bir şekilde büyüyebilir.
Bunun dışında özellikle Rwa alanında gizliliğe ihtiyaç duyulmakta zira mülkiyetle ilgili bazı ayrıntıların gizli olması gerekebilir.
Kredi, sigortacılık vs gibi alanlarda da gizlilik ihtiyacı vardır.
Haliyle bu tarz regüle alanlarda zk teknolojisi ciddi anlamda işe yarayıp kurumsal yatırımlar çekebilir.

[ZkNoid @ZkNoid]

🚀🎉 Big news, everyone! 🎉🚀

The L1 Lottery game is now officially LIVE on the @MinaProtocol #mainnet! 🎊

Play now 👉 https://t.co/EaTYb0caVH

Dive into a redefined experience where fun meets the unmatched security and provability of #ZK. Grab your gift codes in the #MINA space, buy more tickets, and seize your chance to WIN BIG!

[ZKmonarch @ZKMonarch]

indeed… Mina has come really far. it is not easy to build a programmable zk chain.

but the wait is over, apps are finally launching. i’m particularly excited about @ZkNoid ’s Lottery game going live this week.

This is only one of the apps launching soon on @MinaProtocol

[Alexander @AlexanderYud1n]

@MinaProtocol @alignedlayer @mysterymeat ZK-proofs are the future, and Mina Protocol and Aligned Layer are the ones making that future a reality

[Mina Protocol (httpz) 🪶 @MinaProtocol]

Heard it might be time to spice up your timeline? 😏🌶️

Kimchi Bytes Episode 3 is now out!

If you thought there was heat before, just wait until you learn about more @alignedlayer lore with @mysterymeat from their ecosystem team and Will Cove, Head of Ecosystem at Mina Foundation.

Full video below 👇

[Alexander @AlexanderYud1n]

Just got my wristband after passing @Bergh_AI! 🚀 Get in line and try it yourself: https://t.co/lXJiBKXrT3

[Mina Protocol (httpz) 🪶 @MinaProtocol]

Titles change, but @bkase_'s commitment to Mina (and his 🎧) is forever

[Mina Protocol (httpz) 🪶 @MinaProtocol]

2024 was a big year for Mina, but what’s next?

Tune into this conversation with co-founder @evanashapiro and @0xPzai tomorrow, December 18 at 12:00 UTC for a recap of the year and some 2025 alpha. 🤫

[Alexander @AlexanderYud1n]

SENDING PROOF OF ALIGNMENT.

I just got eligibly aligned with 21743 $ALIGN 🟩 @AlignedFndn.

Check if you are aligned at: https://t.co/cZ7jElAhUV

Learn more about aligned at: https://t.co/hIUA85KYwj