Hey, everyone, thanks for joining us. Let me know if you can hear me with some reactions.
We'll get started in just a few minutes. For now, enjoy some background music and grab a
drink, settle in for a fun casual builder's hangout today.
Well, of course, now that I said that, I can hear you.
Hey, Will. Yeah, we can hear you.
Of course, now that I said enjoy the music, I can't get the elevator music to turn back on.
So sorry about that, everyone. Enjoy the silence for a few minutes while we get people loaded in.
And we'll get started in just a couple minutes.
Maybe I can fill some silence. Can you guys hear me okay?
Nice. So maybe while we wait to get going, I just want to comment on the news that we had in the Mina ecosystem of Brandon Case being named CEO of Owen Labs, which is really, I think, awesome news for the ecosystem going forward.
I've met Brandon. Brandon was kind of the person who all imported me into Mina, and my first job working for Mina Foundation was to just basically follow him around and carry the bags for doing meetups.
This was in April of 2022, so we had just started, I guess, doing in-person meetups. Mina had just started doing in-person meetups for the first time after COVID.
And there was like 10, 5, 10 people showing up to each one. Maybe I met some people on the call there, but Brandon was super generous.
I knew nothing, and he was able to basically teach me all about Mina from scratch.
And there's no, out of all of the meetups and events that we did in person, I never saw him unable to answer a question as deep, you know, into the deep cryptography about the proof system, but all the way up to like,
Oh, on JS at the time, SnarkyJS, which was a completely different, looks completely different than it did now. So I'm really pleased to hear that news.
And I think the Mina community, hopefully you share that, you share that with me as well.
And also just a huge thanks to Emre, who was at 01, I think, for five or six years and put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into getting us to where we are now and deserves a lot of credit.
So I just want to give a thanks to Emre as well for everything and wish him luck in the next chapter as well.
For sure. Thanks for, thanks for starting us off with such like a positive vibe Will.
It's a really exciting, exciting time for the ecosystem and you know there have been some, some leadership changes but I think that things are really, really looking positive and hopefully you all in the community are feeling, feeling that momentum and feeling
So, I think with that yeah we've probably, we're about ready to get started.
I'm going to kick us off with just a couple of housekeeping notes before we dive into the cohort three conversation.
But first of all, thanks so much everyone for joining us. My name is Madeline I'm on the communications team at the Mina Foundation.
And a couple of housekeeping notes before we get started this conversation is going to be centered around Mina developer grant opportunities and particularly the zk ignite program.
We have cohort three coming up proposals are due first draft proposals are due next Wednesday I'm sure we'll we'll get into that a little bit more.
Just so everyone knows, if you're listening in on this call and you are a zk ignite builder from cohort one or cohort two.
You are absolutely welcome to come up and speak and share a bit about your experience just either raise your hand or request.
If not, if you have questions we're going to ask that folks leave their questions underneath the tweet that this space is in so basically just write a reply to this space with your question and we'll try to answer them at the end.
So, yeah, okay, with that out of the way, let me hand it over to will to share a little bit about.
We'll get into cohort three and a bit but maybe we'll just kick things off by talking about some of the reasons why developers might choose to to build on Mina and build with zk.
Yeah, thanks, Maddie. I'll I think I see a lot of familiar faces on the call so I'll, I'll rock through it pretty quickly.
I think there's a few there's a few reasons, first and foremost, you know you can approach it from the actual network level the blockchain itself.
Anyone who's building on me now so fully believes in the power of blockchains which means verifiable data trust is eroding as society and we need to kind of upgrade our digital system so that important data can be access checked validated by adversarial parties people that
agree with on one another, not necessarily don't have to be adversarial but just anybody, anybody really, and money spend the first use case but you know we're thinking of.
It will spread to the entire internet, and we need, you know, we need an internet that we can trust.
And so, for Mina, Mina has zero knowledge proofs at its core architecture. It's built to be a system that can always be accessible, no matter how much it's used, or no matter how much time passes.
You're verifying a proof that the current state is valid, whereas in non zk native blockchains you're actually syncing and downloading the entire history of the chain which means over time, this source of immutable truth is harder and harder to access.
So if you're somebody, you know, considering where you want to build and you want the chain to always be accessible, whether it's now or whether it's 1000 years from now, you know, Mina will be there Mina will be the same size, you know, you will be thinking from Genesis multiple times a day when you're accessing the network in the future.
And so we kind of like think about the people who are decentralization maxis and got into blockchain for this reason, Mina as a home, as a home, but it's also you know it's a layer one blockchain and provides many features at the application level as well we're working towards this main end upgrade right now the chain is just
setting and receiving transactions and that was a feat in itself as the first zk native blockchain on mainnet. But now we're bringing programmability and the application layer, there's a lot of interesting things that you can do on the application layer on top of it.
And so, first and foremost, just like the chain is is comprised of recursive zero knowledge snarks zk snarks within applications and using a one JSA framework developed by one labs, that's written in TypeScript, you can do off chain computation and prove that that that that that computation was executed correctly on chain in the form of a proof.
And so anyone who's interested in doing things with private made private data, whether that's voting or general attestations there's lots of use cases within attestations co computation across multiple parties and being able to prove again on chain selectively certain aspects of that computation is is really interesting.
There's also a lot of, you know, it allows you to kind of think about designing more efficiently and that you're not creating transaction fees when you're broadcasting transactions across you know to every node on the network with a blockchain and you know more traditional blockchains or the I would say like earlier generation blockchains like Ethereum.
And so if you're like we're seeing a lot of people interested in gaming that want to be able to run much of the game off chain and only be able to update state selectively when that state is updated, there's consistent fees, rather than being dependent on how much, you know, whatever the gas, whatever the gas is on the network at that time.
We're also thinking a lot about just like I mentioned the internet kind of the internet you can trust and you see HTTP is kind of like something I've been campaigning I saw that one from from Matthew the cryptography architect that on labs.
But just the idea that, you know, when
Because Mina in itself is comprised of proofs.
The idea that you can really like trade the certificate that you would normally get of authenticity of the sender for a web three certificate of authenticity of data shifting more towards trusted trusted data towards trusted centers and of course the data itself is in the form of proofs.
Proof the way that Mina's design is super composable.
And that will approve system is intended to be super composable. That's a lot of work that's undergoing behind the scenes that I want labs, but we're thinking about like on a much grander scale, how the
Mina's proof system can be applied to just the way that we we interact with trusted data on the internet.
And so I, you know, that's kind of another layer down, but it's something that we are really interested in. There's a lot of people building towards that future.
Yeah, thanks. Well, that's awesome. And a really great kind of overview hitting hitting many, many of the key points.
One thing that you didn't quite touch on, which I think might be you being humble is also just the supportive
Mina community that we have here. Sorry.
Calling me out. Yeah, no, yeah, I can hear you. Okay, awesome. Yeah, I thought I thought I might have frozen.
Not calling you out, just letting you know, you know, will is will is a humble guy, but he's also done a lot of work to help facilitate a super supportive Mina community as well as obviously the Mina community itself.
All of you who are a part of it. I feel like we get a lot of feedback that Mina is a great place to to jump in and to learn and you know when you're in our discord, you're getting your questions answered.
And builders are really trying to help one another along the process as they're learning zk as they're learning to build these really novel use cases that a lot of people haven't haven't explored yet. It's definitely navigating uncharted uncharted waters, which might be a good segue to talk about some of our developer grant programs, including the navigators program.
But just in general, we're really, really thankful that we have this community that's aligned around some shared values that all comes together to try to support one another's work.
Yes, definitely. And that's shout out to a lot of people on this call who make that possible. Many, many other a lot of familiar faces and a lot of them are actively involved in helping other people in the community right now.
So yeah, so I maybe I'll go over quickly like our job as Mina Foundation is to basically facilitate the programs and make sure that the incentives are aligned across the whole community towards building out the future that I described and of course like mapping shaping it towards however the technology ends up developing.
But right now, the we have a number of different programs and the programs themselves are getting to the point where their communities, they're like self sufficient within the community and Mina Foundation's role is to kind of put the mechanisms in place and make sure that the funding is available from the treasury, but then really like having them kind of grow within the community itself.
So that is at the local level, we have local community managers in a number of different places, India, Vietnam, we're hiring someone in Korea, we have a team in China as well, who are hosting local hackathons and events.
Those hackathons and events, then our turkey as well. Sorry. Those hackathon and events are yielding kind of like leaders within their respective like sub communities or local communities, we get those people we offer them the ability to start participating in the navigators program, which is an always on grants funnel to be able to kind of choose your own adventure and build out products and services within the ecosystem.
We started that in October, and now we're up to about, I think, in December, we had 55 people receive navigator grants, and a total like people with the badges, I think we have something like 60 to 65.
And there's a certain there's a number of requirements in order to get grants, but we're like one thing that I'm pretty excited about is we're actually for the first time this month infusing a layer in the governance of that program and that there's a team of, I think,
five to six reviewers who are stepping in to actually give feedback and improve or deny the milestone grants that are being suggested each month. And so we've just been working spending this week onboarding that team and the goal is to eventually and more and more responsibility over to them.
People who are building and navigators can then also apply for zk ignite, which we kind of started the conversation with, which is a kind of cohort based innovation fund that is focused on mostly zk app products and many of the people on this call it participated in previous cohorts, we just had cohort two projects to present on their milestones last week, and there are
And, and now electors are spending this electors who are the kind of governance mechanism within zk nine are are actually voting on if those milestones were delivered and we're going to kind of do a lot of public announcements related to that so everyone can see the work that's been done and make all that information public.
And then we have corporate three deadline next week. So the goal is to really make sure that if you know if you can tell there's always something that you can do across the ecosystem.
And, and I think the, the idea that no matter what skill level you're at, or what kind of like ambitions you have if you have if you understand how many works and you have a unique idea, we want to make sure that there's a place for you.
And that there's funding available and and that you can also get connected with other community members to help you along the way.
If anyone hasn't is curious about what's going on in the mean of discord, I would just are both in the mean of community like the first place that I would point people is to go to discord and go to the zk apps q amp a forum, and there's just so much activity happening there.
I think we started the channel in January of last year, maybe, maybe December of the previous but you know it's been around for roughly 13 months, and I think we're up to like over like 8000 unique posts on the on the channel itself and much of that is like deep technical talk.
So, it's, I would say like, in the idea of going from when I mentioned starting with Brandon when we were going from place to place and it's like giving a half baked talk on the caps because the caps at the time where it was you know snarky jazz was there weren't even any tutorials there
and the docs available to now seeing where the community you know the support layer within the community is almost self sufficient and we're starting to see some like real products and leaders emerge within that it's pretty crazy to see and it I think it's just a vote in favor of open source
in general not just Mina but it's an example of how ecosystem development can happen when you really pour fuel on the fire all at once.
And I think the goal for this year is to triple down on that, and to make sure that, like, as especially since we're approaching the network upgrade that we're, we're pouring fuel on the fire, I would say.
I really couldn't agree more and I joined the Mina Foundation team towards the end of 2022 so right as we were getting ready to kick off our first kind of experimental cohort zero of zk ignite, which was a kind of mini mini online hackathon version that was planted the seeds for for what zk
ignite has become today but it's just been really incredible to see over, you know, just a little over a year, how we've gone from that, like, kind of, for any of you who participated in cohort zero which I think a couple of you on this call did like it was a bit
of a chaotic, like hackathon experience so to go from that to being in the midst of our third zk ignite cohort as well as introducing the navigators program so that there's a bit more of an avenue or a runway for people to to get involved and start
as well as now we have the core grants program for, like, really established developer teams to respond to RFPs or requests for proposal so it's just awesome to see how, how the support structure for devs building on Mina has has really been built out and fleshed out over the past year and like, there's obviously
still always going to be room for improvement and ways to go. I think that that's just part of working in this space in general, but if you think about what's been accomplished in the past 12 months it's really, it's really quite exciting and impressive so big shout out to Will and his team as well as
as he mentioned like so many of the awesome and super super smart community members who have basically become their own like self sufficient self supporting like docs Mina educators Mina advocates like we're, we're so grateful for the support that you all are able to give us so I feel like with that, lots of
love going around, hopefully, you guys are feeling the love as well. Let's dive in a little bit more on zk ignite specifically. Will I know that you are a super strong advocate for the actual structure of the zk ignite cohort, which is a little bit more focused around
zk ignite, which is the idea that community kind of comes together and creates these genius ideas as a collective and not so much in individual silos. So can you speak a little bit about the kind of grassroots approach that zk ignite takes towards zk app innovation, as well as the crowd voting
decentralized structure. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Seniors, what a weird word, and a great word at the same time. If anyone's curious where that comes from. I think Kevin Kelly coined it in like a 2008 blog post. But it's, it's not a, it's not a unique term to him in that.
This, it's the idea that when you have a highly motivated group of people with various different backgrounds and, you know, people don't necessarily even have to know each other, but with various
niche expertise that they're bringing from a kind of like very specific career or set of experiences or, or academic background, but they're all highly motivated and working in the same space. If you create conditions for them to work together, but also compete with one another.
The speed of innovation or the speed of development is compounding. It's the case for, I think, Renaissance art in, in Florence. They, there's a lot of examples of the insurance industry being created in Lloyd's baking houses in London.
Sorry, coffee houses in London in the 1800s, Silicon Valley in its earliest days, just an incredibly high density of talent with very specific backgrounds who all come from a different, a separate place, but are competing or are working together in a close knit way to push each other forward.
That yields much, much better results than everyone working in silos and potentially kind of trying to, trying to build out duplicative products and, and I think we're starting to see it with ZK Ignite in that building out in the open is, is compounding.
The effects are compounding. I'd like to see it a lot more even, and especially now that we have certain infrastructure products becoming available, like Zeko or Protokit or Anomics or a few others.
The idea that, that everybody can compete against each other in this kind of cohort based ideas is, I think, quite powerful. And it's not competition in a zero sum way, but when we're building an ecosystem, it's completely positive sum.
Because there, you know, we have to build the roads and the water filtration system and figure out the laws related to how, how they, you know, how, how I'm using a metaphor for just like, you know, building a city or building, building a country from the ground up.
It kind of like takes trying to work on everything at once and, and the best way to do that is by increasing the density of people who are highly experienced and willing to kind of go for it.
You'll see, I, for those who I know, again, there's many people who are here who this is no surprise, but now we have many different advisors of projects who have met through this program, either through mentoring or through electoring, being electors, and it's, and it's really powerful to see.
Maddie mentioned kind of the community governance aspect. And the way that CK Knight works is all of the funding is actually voted on or the proposal funding is voted on by a team of electors.
And then we also have a team of technical reviewers who provide input in regards to like feasibility and architecture and design and, and whether or not the proposals are fitting Mina's mindset, or like Mina's kind of like design.
Structure, the way, you know, it's kind of how I started to call off with, with certain design choices that have been made to architect Mina as a, as a zk native layer one.
So I think for anyone considering and participating over the next, or if you've already submitted a proposal or you are submitting a proposal, a huge aspect is paying attention to how electors respond to you via feedback and on the way that you are.
And all of that feedback will come in public and form of comments on your proposal on the zk Knight platform. And it's not just like foot feedback so you can feel good about yourself for so that you can get critiqued.
This is actually how the decisions get made for how voting works.
Feedback, you know, we have a feedback phase and that feedback phase then turns into a voting phase, and at every step of the way the community is kind of like there's like a constant pulse on which projects are responding well which projects are taking that feedback on board and ultimately like
which projects have done their due diligence around how, how to build a product with Mina with on JS, and are thinking about it in the right way.
I'll also take this time to, to maybe as a word of caution for anybody who's participating in zk Knight, who is coming from another ecosystem, especially like maybe with a solidity background.
Mina is not Ethereum. We are we have a huge respect for Ethereum and there's also state bridge that's being built to Ethereum so that the zk apps can be compatible and you can you can access me in a state on in the Ethereum ecosystem, which that, you know, there's a whole myriad of use cases that can be used there.
However, when you're coming and you're thinking about designing your application on Mina.
And again, as I described, it's a completely different type of a blockchain. We like to think of it kind of as a next generation. And with that in mind, thinking about where you know how you use compute, how you what's off chain what's on chain, how you're thinking about storage, how you think about data availability.
A lot of these questions need to be addressed when you're reviewing the proposals. And one of the first things that electors will be looking for is how has this person done the research on how Mina works.
So, just a word of wisdom, not not to be scary, but for people who are considering.
It's really, really important. And if you need, again, if you need help, or you want to, you want to think about the right way to, to do that, like, go to discord, and there's more than enough, more than enough opportunities to learn there.
Also share, we've been working as part of the navigators program we have Lawrence Kirk from extra p.io who's been running a course on Mina and there's, we just published the last two sessions on a Mina community YouTube channel.
And if you're just getting started maybe I'd recommend checking out those two videos first, even before you'd write a proposal.
Nice. And maybe for those folks who are thinking about getting involved or haven't quite started working on their proposals yet. I think you just gave some definitely some good pieces of advice but can we talk a little bit about some of the cohort two projects to share as as inspiration.
I know you probably know but cohort two has just presented their final milestones, which was a really big achievement.
And, yeah, will can you touch on some highlights from from those milestone presentations and what what exciting projects should we be on the lookout for.
Yes, so I'll be I'm actually not going to name any projects by name right now because I don't want to endorse anything right before we're about to go into voting for three.
Just I'm very sensitive to that, just because everything that we say there there are implications but I will say that there's a lot of different use cases that have come out, and I think are very powerful.
One of them was like a no code application for creating escrow smart contracts inside of the app. I think that is a really interesting idea, especially when we have the caps on mainnet, and we have a lot of influx, not in varying technical expertise of how people
want to build Z caps and what they want to do with them and having a no code tools is really cool. There's multiple projects working on verifiable identity.
We have a telegram group about 20 builders all working on this together I see right us I see a few other I see a few others who are who are working on this, or, you know, general verifiable identity and then identity through NFTs as well as is really interesting.
We had Elia on last time to talk about geolocation privacy his geolocation privacy service which I think is really interesting enables users to authenticate geographic location with different service providers, there is projects related to voting so like verifiable
on and off chain dial voting with valid privacy.
So, again, thinking about dial voting and other ecosystems where your, your votes are public and also your identity is tied to that with, you know, God knows what else you might have been doing.
But the idea like that's just not necessary and that is like a very, you know, early point in time where dial voting is tied to like doxing yourself in every in every regard, or at least to your on chain identity so I think that's really important.
There's a few NFT marketplaces also. I see, yeah, like I said I see DFT on there I see the dude, also here, who did a sealed sealed bid auction platform which is pretty cool.
But again, there's many that there's, I could go through the full list of 24, and I won't, and I will just say we're going to release the projects publicly in a few weeks, or no.
I think next week I think with with the results. And at any time you can also go and you can check out which projects already like did get funded so none of its private it's just we're we're in the process of calculating the final results for cohort two and we'll be, we'll be announcing that very very shortly.
Yeah, that's super exciting. And I guess just to bring things back to cohort three as a reminder for anyone listening on this call draft proposals are due next Wednesday.
Yeah, and I guess, important to to remind folks that they are drafts. They don't have to be final, as we'll mentioned earlier, there is a feedback phase where you have the opportunity to iterate on your proposal so if you have an idea that you're really passionate about but you know you're not sure you
don't have every kink worked out like that's okay.
But that being said as well like please do do some some due diligence in trying to ensure that your project is actually feasible on Mina.
Will do you have anything to add there. Yeah, I'll just say we're not accepting proposals that are like draft and not filled out or filled out halfway or have like clearly been like a placeholder, those will be thrown out.
And that will be, I'll be, I'll be working with the electors on like figuring out what exactly what that standard looks like but just don't, don't try to game the system, because we'll, we're going to kind of police it because we get a lot of proposals that
and the electors are taking a lot of time with.
And, you know, going through these and leaving credible feedback so if you don't have a draft that you're proud of or that like is, I would say like 80% 75% there, then it won't be accepted.
Yep. Yeah, good clarification. So I've also invited on to the stage our panic from proto kits, just to see if he wanted to share a little bit about, you know, how builders can use proto kit in their cohort three proposals.
Yeah, sure. Can you guys hear me.
Yeah, thanks for the opportunity.
Yeah, I just wanted to kind of quickly mentioned product kit and kind of give a rough introduction to what it is and like how you can use it into your to build your project on Mina and kind of also use it for your cohort three proposal.
So yeah, product kit basically is a app chain framework for building your own app chain on top of Mina. And yeah, I think, as most of you guys know, most computation on Mina happens off chain.
One of the things that you you don't have this traditional execution model where you have on chain logic instead have this off chain logic and we basically built a framework where you can very easily build applications using that execution model.
Basically, what we build is a collection of tools and a framework where you can only focus on the business logic and we take care of all of the hassle of doing the proof generation during the depth of infrastructure.
And we abstract a lot of the difficult things away. They can really block you in the beginning of getting into Mina and we kind of want to lower the barrier to entry by a lot. And that's what we built.
Our project actually came from cohort one of CKignite. So we got funded there and started building that and we continued to do so since then.
So yeah, I highly encourage you to look into product kit. We have a website with docs coming out very soon. It's productkit.dev. We also have a Discord server where you can ask questions all the time.
So feel free to check that out. We have a Twitter where we post regular information. So we highly encourage you to look into product kit, start reading into it and see if we can offer some value to your project.
And we definitely think that most of the proposals coming in should use product kit, but obviously that's up to your own judgment. So yeah, I'm happy to answer any questions if there are in our Discord and looking forward to seeing a lot of proposals for cohort three using product kit.
Awesome. Thanks so much, Arpanik. And I feel like this is probably a good moment to mention too. Will might be able to elaborate a bit, but because of the way CKignite is broken into these two tracks, there's the CKApp track as well as the developer tooling track.
There are a lot of really great tools and infrastructure pieces that have been built in the previous two cohorts that developers can start to utilize to smooth out their development experience.
Since this is still a bit of a nascent ecosystem, there's these really great tools that are starting to be built to make your developer journey a bit easier.
Do you have anything to maybe add? You nailed it. Yeah, no, that's perfect.
Awesome. Okay, cool. Well, I kept an eye on the comments. There are a couple questions, but they're not relevant to CKignite, so I think we are going to leave them out of this conversation at the moment.
I do see from Valentin something that says, I just learned that Mina is also focused on privacy.
I thought it was only focused on being lightweight. So that's good to know. Glad that you've learned this.
Mina is really focused on ZK everything. So ZK has these properties that allow for Mina to be the lightest blockchain in the world, but it also allows these really cool properties around privacy that we are trying to enable developers to utilize.
Thanks for that comment, and thanks for joining us.
With that, yeah, I'll hand it over to Will to maybe just give some closing remarks and then we can wrap things up.
Yeah, thanks, Maddie, and thanks, Claire Raphael, for joining.
If you're thinking about, you know, there's still a week left, so even if you haven't started a proposal, I'd say it's not too late.
If you want to get involved in any other way, just come to the Discord. There's many opportunities, like not just on Twitter, but also just many.
We try to do one to two calls a week where we are just interacting with, you know, making sure that there's always something going on.
So come hang out with us and join the crazy ride that is currently happening.
And yeah, looking forward to seeing you there.
Great. Thank you so much, Will. Yeah, there's one more question. When Mainnet dApps, we don't have a solid date locked in yet.
However, we just wrapped up track three of our test world mission 2.0, which is the testnet ahead of the upgrade that will bring ZK Apps onto Mainnet.
So stay tuned for more updates. Track three is closed. We're in the midst of track four, which is our final preparations.
And we should be sharing a date in the future, but we don't have a date quite yet that we can share publicly. So stay tuned.
Thanks again, everyone, for joining us. If you have questions about ZK Ignite, like Will said, please just hop into Discord.
There's lots of support and folks there to help you out. Yeah, and we're really looking forward to seeing everyone's proposals next week.
Fantastic. Thanks, Maddie. Thanks, everybody. Awesome. Thanks, everyone. Have a good rest of your day.