Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
Updates from Brandon and Josh
Recorded: April 8, 2025 Duration: 1:15:01Space Recording
Short Summary
The MENA Foundation and O1 Labs are embarking on a transformative journey, focusing on strategic partnerships, project launches, and a commitment to decentralized governance. With a protocol upgrade on the horizon and a renewed emphasis on grants and community engagement, the ecosystem is poised for significant growth and innovation.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Hello, everyone.
I think Brandon, you're here.
Hello.
There we go.
Great.
First, yeah, I just want to say thank you to everyone for y'all's patience, as it took a little bit to get this call arranged, I know. And there's been a lot going on, and we haven't had a chance to really talk to everyone about what's happening, but I'm glad that we finally do today.
finally do today. So yeah, I think Brandon and I are going to walk through a bit of,
well, I'm going to walk through a bit of what's been happening at the MENA Foundation,
and then we're both going to talk a bit about what to expect for MENA going forward,
and a lot of the initiatives that have been going on, and where we can go from here.
And I think a lot of you already have, I mean, so many of you know, Brandon really well. Uh, I'm sure you all now, now know me somewhat, not as well, but, but know
that I'm, I'm, uh, that I've been around for a while and that, um, I'm a big believer in, uh,
in Mina reaching its, its true potential and true vision. Uh, and I think we can, we can get there,
uh, even, even as we're going through a lot of these crazy changes.
So let's go ahead and jump in.
So I think that there have been a lot of changes,
and we want to be really open to the ecosystem about why and what's next.
And for us, that means resetting on what MENA is and why it's valuable.
you know, resetting on what MENA is and why it's valuable.
So MENA itself has been designed with a really specific purpose in mind.
It's a scalable base layer optimized for verifying zero-knowledge proofs in a cheap and efficient way
without having to rely on off-chain infrastructure or trust in intermediaries.
trust in intermediaries. And I think that part of that, you know, the thesis there is that
cryptographic security is the most important component in a decentralized financial system.
And as the network grows, anyone who's a participant should be able to verify the
security of the network in a really low cost way. And that you shouldn't need additional
infrastructure to aggregate and settle proofs.
And I would say that, like, that first part of the vision was really achieved by O-Labs
before the MENA Foundation was spun out, because, you know, MENA brought the first,
basically the first CK roll-up in production. And then it created a design for decentralized prover marketplaces.
And, you know, as that, after that happened,
the MENA Foundation was created to steward the brand and a treasury,
but, you know, the scope expanded to try to incubate an application ecosystem,
you know, and in that process, you know,
what we end up learning is that after trying a lot of different angles here,
that, but Mina itself isn't really designed to be a good application platform
in and of itself. Just like a few examples here,
Mina doesn't have self-executing contracts and nor does it store
executable contracts on chain.
It doesn't really provide tools for managing state related to an application the way you
would get that in other out-of-the-box smart contract solutions.
And it's like really super slow for good reason, because everything is done with these nested
ZK proofs.
But I don't think we're, you know,
that doesn't mean that we should just say,
okay, well, no application,
no, you know, no solid application environment.
We can't build, you know,
everything that we want directly on the protocol.
That doesn't mean we just hold our hands up and say,
we're not going to be able to do this.
Instead, we have to recognize
that it is the right design for scalable applications as
long as we think about MENA as one component in a whole modular stack. So any application that
requires low-cost proof aggregation should be using MENA and O1JS. And MENA shouldn't just be
the execution environment for these applications. It shouldn't be the execution
environment later. It should be a place where proofs are verified and settled. So it's sort
of like a shared repo for proofs of applications. So the fact of the matter is that there's only
been a small subset of the applications across the ecosystem that have been designed with MENA being this modular component in mind.
So we need to pivot really hard to get back on track there.
And I think that what Brandon and I have been talking about over these last few weeks,
and then what I've been working on internally with the team,
is that we really feel it's best to have O1 Labs
take the lead on the technical roadmap while the MENA Foundation focuses on the decentralized
treasury. So anyway, I just jumped across a lot of different bounds there, but Brandon,
I wanted to give you an opportunity to jump in and just add any color there, but just wanted to give you an opportunity to jump in and just, you know, add any color there, but, but just wanted to get, you know,
get off on this, this get off on,
on the foot of saying like,
we know that things haven't gone the way that they,
that we expected and that we need to pivot hard. And this is part of the,
you know, the thinking that went on, went on there. So, but yeah, Brandon,
if you want to add anything by all means, go for it.
Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. thanks so much, Josh.
I think you got a lot of details there.
I guess, yeah, I just want to say we're really excited
at OM Labs to pick up these, um, you know, responsibilities around,
uh, you know, leading, leading the technical roadmap, um, and then, and also executing,
executing against it. That's super important. Um, so, uh, yeah, I, I think, you know, we're,
we're really excited to, to push Mina in this direction and, you know, we're really excited to push Mina in this direction. And, you know, we, yeah, I guess it's important to say that, like, we, you know, we have to acknowledge that we should have, you know,
we have to acknowledge that uh we should have you know uh we we we could have kind of realized
this earlier maybe um and so like we we all need to take responsibility um you know including me
uh everyone everyone working in the ecosystem and i'm i'm just really excited that like we have this
clarity and we can move forward pushing mina in in this direction of, you know, being like the, this, uh,
this like modular, um, execution environment, uh, or this, this,
this modular stack upon which to build, to build applications.
Um, so I guess like in, in the spirit of, you know, pushing on the technical roadmap
and like pushing us forward and shipping and shipping stuff on time, you know, I also want
to like take this opportunity to say that like we are committed to um to to pushing a protocol upgrade um by the fall of this year um we're
i'm sure i'll i'll talk about this more in different pieces during this this call but um
uh you know we'll also have a meaner research post coming out probably by the end of this call where people can jump into the details.
So, yeah, I guess let me end on, you know, this whole situation is sort of like a hard reset, I guess.
a hard, hard reset, I guess. Um, and, you know, uh, we want to get stuff back on track and
that's what we're going to do. Yes. Thanks. Yeah. Thanks Brandon. Yeah. I think, I think that's,
um, that's right on the money and that's where we also realized that we've made commitments in the
past that we haven't been able to meet. And I think one of them was this idea that
MENA could be an application platform in and of itself instead of being something more modular.
And that would have been, as you said, it would have been great if we had made that pivot earlier. But I think that the most important thing is that both the MENA Foundation and O of One are aligned on this renewed reset. And that's where we want to go. And we can, I think, do a better job of making commitments that we, uh, that we then follow through on. And it was really great, Brandon,
that you explicitly called out that y'all were aiming for the hard fork, uh,
to, to continue to push on this vision by, by the fall. So that's great. Um,
but yeah, I think, I think in that vein, um,
it might be good to just go through, uh, because there have been,
and we're going to, there will be, I think, a place like a record as well a little bit later on
after the call where we detail the state
of a lot of these things that people can go back to as well
and so they can get that update if they haven't,
if they aren't on this call.
But I think we should go through some of our,
the product priorities that have been priorities on the MENA Foundation side and talk a bit about where they are, either where they are with MENA or with the MENA Foundation or where they might go under the purview of O1 Labs in the future. So, and, you know, to be quite blunt,
a lot of these might be disappointing to the community
because they were things that were promised
that we won't be able to deliver on,
but I just want to be as explicit as possible
about us not being able to get them done.
And for reasons that are very much related to that,
you know, what we were talking about earlier
about MENA being much more of a modular piece
in a broader app stack.
So let me, yeah, let me just jump on.
And I think like the first one that's sort of top of mind
for lots of people is ProtoKit.
And Brandon, I hope you actually don't mind,
even though I know this is something
that has been pushed through on the, or it's been, you know, pushed forward by the MENA
Foundation. It'd be great to get you to give a sort of explanation on, because you're much
more technical than I am, about like why ProtoKit's needed and what folks can expect
from it going forward. Yeah. Yeah. So, so yeah, just to remind everyone,
or if you're new to, to, to Mina, to how Mina works, then I guess I'll tell you for the first
time. Actually, you know what, Josh, Josh said this earlier. So, so yeah, so Mina, Mina's uh like zkapp platform it actually doesn't provide an execution environment in
and of itself so the the way it works is um uh all execution happens off chain uh and proofs
are created for different steps of the of the execution and then that's verified on chain
the of the execution and then that's verified on chain um and you know this was always sort of the
intentional design of of mina um but but what we observed uh when you know when this was in the
wild and in the hands of developers is that um this is uh more of a foundation rather than a usable interface in and of itself to build applications.
You know, it is the foundation upon which you can build an execution environment, a
place where applications get executed.
Without that, the applications in MENA, they have to basically build their application framework
themselves.
And so what ProtoKit is, is it's a really great execution
environment that's built on top of this foundation
that MENA provides.
So that's why we need something like ProtoKit.
And ProtoKit in particular is great.
It's a great solution to the problem.
So I guess I want to say that just to be really clear, myself and the team at O1 Labs, we really, really support the protocid team and we want to help get this project out and in production.
I guess like the state of it, you know, from my understanding is, you know, it's close
to getting something, you know, DevNet ready.
So there's like maybe, you know, some work to do to get there.
So I don't want people to think
it's coming tomorrow um but but there's there's uh some folks that are that are dedicated to building
it um who who were within uh um the the mina community that uh later got kind of picked up by MENA Foundation directly.
And yeah, just to be clear, like Owen Labs definitely is supporting this.
So they're working towards a milestone of getting to the point where people can launch their own like testnet platforms with Protokit. After that DevNet, the main focus will be
getting the codebase ready for an audit.
So, you know, refactoring, documenting,
adding test coverage.
And, you know, and in the end, like,
the, there's sort of details of like exactly how this moves forward that we're still sorting out.
But, you know, I don't know where I was going.
We're very excited to move forward with that.
to move forward with them.
I'll stop there.
I'll stop there.
Yeah, I think the real,
the summary point is that O of One is supportive
of continuing to develop ProtoKit.
It will be continuing to develop
because it meets a very important need
for application development on MENA.
And we'll still meet that need even in this renewed vision
where MENA is just a modular part
of a bigger application stack.
Is that a good summary, you think, Brandon? Yes, thanks. Cool. Yeah, yeah, sure. So now I think that we're going
to move into another category, which is just DEXs. And I think this is going to be a bit of a hot
button issue. And I'm going to be pretty transparent here because I just want to be
as explicit as possible. I think that the community has been, from everything that I've seen,
really adamant that we need a DEX.
And I definitely hear that.
I do want to say very clearly that I think that one of the views on the MF side,
and I don't want to speak for Brandon, but I will speak for me here. And the MF is that another DEX is not something that will make MENA unique relative to the rest of the ecosystem.
I do hear that the community wants it and there are still many paths ahead of us that we're going
to talk about. But I just want to try and maybe offer this idea that like having another, you know, another place to
trade tokens natively on the MENA L1 that won't necessarily be as performant or as enjoyable as
other DEXs and other ecosystems, I'm not sure that is going to move the needle on MENA for what it
could be. But that said, we know that there have been things
that have been promised and that people want to see
some opportunity for being able to use that primitive on Mina.
And, you know, just because that's my opinion doesn't, you know,
it doesn't change the fact that, like, there are others
that want to, you know, that want to see that.
Sorry, Brandon, did you unmute?
Yeah, yeah, just to see that. Sorry, Brandon, did you unmute? Yeah, just to jump in.
I also agree with Josh there.
Let me put it another way.
Mina is not the right place to do the DeFi gambling scene.
um there's a million places to do that and like there doesn't need to be another one um there is
There's a million places to do that,
and there doesn't need to be another one.
value in um in having the or facilitating a place where projects that are building on mina can have
access to liquidity for for tokens that they launch themselves so that that is certainly
valuable and like a dex umX or other tools can play an important
role in that. But I just want everyone to realize like the reason, you know, the reason
to build these kinds of tools is to facilitate this ecosystem where people can have access to liquidity.
It's not to create a gambling den.
There's enough of this.
Yeah, plus one.
Couldn't agree more.
And yeah, I mean, so on that note,
there are still avenues for DEXs to be built on Mina,
and I'm going to talk about a few of them or in the current state of them.
So one of the biggest ones is Lumina, which was started two years ago.
So they're an independent team that the foundation has supported in the past.
And they have said that they're close to delivering for a while, but I don't want to speak on their behalf.
And I think it's important to just wait to hear directly from them.
And I just also would say that they are not the only path to a DEX and that there are other options ahead of us.
So another independent team is DynoDEX, and it was developed based on a protokit fork, but it's very much
dependent on protokit settlement and DA to work. So I think that that one is incumbent on protokit
being usable on mainnet for that to work. And I expect that that probably means that it won't be
on mainnet maybe until after the hard fork. But
there is another avenue for a DEX, because I think that both the Dino DEX and Lumina approaches
are either using, you know, in Lumina case, like, they're trying to approach it by using
ZECO as an L2, and in Dino DEX, I think it's meant to be directly on the L1.
But we know, as we sort of talked about earlier,
that MENA as an L1 has significant drawbacks.
So there's a possibility to explore other execution environments
that settle to MENA that still enable people to use a DEX.
And, you know, we think that a solution for this probably can't wait.
Oh, excuse me. Sorry, sorry. I'm like
recovering from a cold. So that's why I sound, it's not just my mic being bad. It's that anyway.
Um, but, uh, but I think that the solution here, um, that this possible solution can't wait for,
for just a transition of more resources over to O one, um 01 from, from the foundation. I think this is a top priority that,
and we can get an update on this by the end of the month
as something that could be an exciting avenue for this.
But, you know, again, I think that as Brandon mentioned,
it really is more about like providing liquidity
for people that wanna use the tools that are going to be
built with with Mina but it's not about creating like a a new gambling den of which there are
already too many um in in the industry as far as I'm concerned um but yeah um I think the next category is bridging.
Because in addition to having liquidity,
it's also important to have actual access to other assets
that are natively represented on other chains and protocols.
So I think this might be something where,
Brandon, you could chime in because you're still more technical than me.
Um, great.
Yeah.
Go for it.
Take it away.
You're my bridge to technical understanding.
Yeah, no worries.
Um, yeah.
Okay.
So bridging, I guess, like, before we go into kind of more, more of the specifics, I think,
um, it's important to just call out, you know,
one of the current trade-offs that MENA has made because that has impact into like the,
you know, what to expect with how bridges work.
So let me just start there um uh so yeah so so mina's um mina's consensus mechanism
it's called ouroboros samaseka i think we have a cool youtube video that i made uh about it um
like four years ago or something uh so look that up um but yeah it uh
look that up. But yeah, it was chosen because there is no compromise on decentralization.
And it's feasible to be proven succinctly. And's like an important property for basically how MENA works.
But one of the one of the trade offs with this with this consensus mechanism is that it does not have instant finality, it has probabilistic finality.
And and, you know, due to the current performance on MENA, although it's going to get a lot better with the protocol upgrade that we're going to ship by default. But with the current performance, it will take maybe around two hours to round trip between, let's say, Ethereum and Mina on any bridge, if they have like finality safety equivalent to that of exchanges
so yeah ultimately again like this this was this was chosen just to prioritize decentralization
um that's like a core value of mina and that remains a core value of mina
um so uh while we can't get this down to instant, we can constantly push down on those two hours over time.
But anyway, with that in mind, I think the ecosystem has had a rocky path towards getting
bridging, working, and having working bridges in the ecosystem. So let me, let me just like go through the,
go through the story and let's revisit it.
So yeah, that sounds good.
Yeah.
So right.
So, so bridging is,
you may think of a bridge as like one thing,
but I think it's good to actually break it apart into two pieces.
There's going from somewhere, let's just say Ethereum.
So from Ethereum to MENA, that's one direction of the bridge.
And the other direction is from MENA to Ethereum.
from MENA to Ethereum.
And these, each of these like halves of the bridge
actually are built completely differently.
So let's talk about what's happened in the past.
There was an early initiative to bridge MENA to Ethereum
that was a joint grant with Ethereum Foundation and Mina Foundation
to NIL Foundation for creating this bridge. And what happened is whatever approach that that mill was using um they uh they essentially got stuck um and it was it was
too expensive to you know to verify uh the the proofs in the way they were building it and and
the the team the team didn't figure it out so uh you know the work uh was stopped so So that's sort of one bridge. Then there was another kind of take on this
project with Lambda Class, and they've been a really, really great partner. And again,
they had the same goal, like get Mina to Ethereum. And the Lambda team did get a lot further and they were able to complete
a working bridge, but the cost to use it was so expensive that it was deemed kind of
sort of a dead end in that sense. But what's interesting is Fede and the team and the Lambda team that were working on
this project, they actually got the idea to create a lined layer from this project because they're
like, hey, if we had something like a lined layer, then we could work around this cost issue.
layer then we could work around this cost issue. So they built a lined layer, shipped it, it's on
Mainnet, and then put the MENA bridge on a lined layer. And you know what? It's actually done.
It's completely implemented, it's completely audited. All of the bugs from the audit are fixed. And the actual, like, technology is ready to run.
Literally, the last step is just finding a team that's willing to operate this bridge. So, like, someone, you know, the Lambda and the Align team, like they're
focused on building infrastructure and like they're not able to kind of prioritize operating
this kind of a bridge. And, you know, there might be some legal things as well.
All this stuff is very complicated to me.
But they did an amazing job and they delivered it.
And so we're actively working with them to find an operator so that we can launch this
thing.
So, yeah, if you know of a team or if you are a team that is excited to take on this work,
then contact Yasin in the MENA world.
So, okay, I'm going too slowly,
so I'm gonna go much faster for the rest of these things.
So that's MENA to Ethereum.
Then Ethereum to MENA,
there's a project called Nori, which is building like a secure ZK state bridge from Ethereum to
MENA. And the work started only in December. But as of a few days ago, the team has been
started only in December, but as of a few days ago, the team has been continuously verifying
and committing Ethereum state to MENA's DevNet.
So that means the whole of Ethereum is accessible on MENA directly from a CK proof.
So on top of this, there needs to be an application or there's space for an application
of a token bridge so um the the the team behind nori which is being led by carol in the ecosystem
is working really hard to to make that happen and you know we're really excited to support them
um and then and then finally there's uh there's a um a multi-sig bridge that MENA Foundation had in development. And maybe I'll pass it to Josh to kind of talk through this one because we haven't been as deeply involved with it.
So anyway, I think that's a great summary, Brandon.
And on the multisig side, like, or on this bridge that was meant to be secured by multisig,
it was built successfully, but after a lot of community testing,
we actually decided to not deploy it.
The reason is that, you know, frankly,
this would have been a very centralized approach to bridging.
And if we have these other two bridges waiting in the wings that are much more natural fits and more decentralized fits,
we don't want to wind up in a situation where there are multiple bridging approaches and standards. that could lead into a lot of folks basically having unclear,
you know, sort of unclear directives
on how they should be bridging state over from Ethereum.
And, you know, frankly, I think this was a bit of a miss on our part
to be pursuing so many of these things simultaneously
when we should have just been focusing on the right approach for the ecosystem.
So like, you know, the big, the big problem here is like, if you can imagine, like, if
you had a version of wrapped Ethereum that was taken into this multisig bridge, and then
you try to use it later on, swapping what you know, using using it in a protocol that
expects the more native like Nori bridge,
Weth, and then you find yourself stuck in a place where you have these two assets that are supposed
to be compatible, but not. So we thought given this and given the fact that we need to focus,
even though this one is ready, it felt like we would have been doing a disservice to the community by shipping it and creating more
confusion later on and ultimately having to eventually probably sunset it because it's not
the right approach. So that was the thinking behind that. And yeah, I think there was, oh,
actually, Brandon, if you don't mind, I to take take it over to you for the celestial geometry thing and then i think i can cover the rest of them after that okay yeah yeah
sorry there's this other i forgot there's there's one more kind of bridge-ish thing um uh which is
an adapter layer between celestia and mina um so uh so we partnered like the, I guess, Mina Foundation and O1 Labs.
We partnered with Celestia and Geometry Labs
to create Celestia integration with Mina.
And it worked.
So that, like Geometry did a great job.
They shipped on time, fully audited. It works. And so, so that they like geometry did a great job.
They shipped on time, fully audited.
It works.
You can integrate with Celestia again.
It's a little slow because of the finality that I talked about before, but you know,
we'll continue to chip away at that.
And, and actually as a side effect of this implementation, you know, the there's now like SB1 ZKVM proof support on MENA.
And actually this feature is what the Nori team was able to leverage to make the Ethereum to M Mina bridge work. So like, I think this is a really powerful tool,
like being able to verify SB1 proofs
within ONJS and Kim Chi and Mina.
So if anyone has other ideas,
you know, you could probably build something cool too.
Cool, thanks, Brandon.
Okay, and then I know we are running out of time
and I very much want to make sure we have time for the collection of community questions that were assembled by the team at the end. So I'm going to try and take these things succinctly, so to speak.
We do have, there's a TypeScript library that implements the private attestations and, you know, wallets.
Right now the development of that library is complete and Palette has actually implemented it already.
And Auro will have, will be in the process of implementing it and should be done in about a month or so.
So I'm really glad that that's going to be, that's going to be shipping soon.
Then there's the NFT standard. The development is complete and the audit is
complete. Shout out to DFST for his very hard work on that. Just to note, as you could probably
tell from the overall theme here, Mina's properties on the L1 are not friendly as a
standalone application environment. And while it is important to have an NFT standard, I would just say you shouldn't expect a likely NFT ecosystem on the L1
itself. But I'm still really glad that we have this work done. I think it's going to pave the
way for more in the future. Launchpad. Development's also complete. Yet another shout out to
DFST for his great work on that. But again, same note as above, you know, the L1 is not really friendly to token trading.
And I do think that addressing this through protoket and other approaches is going to be the way forward.
But a standalone token economy on MENA is going to require a lot of work.
token economy on MENA is going to require a lot of work and, you know, I think may be
ultimately less important long-term compared to focusing on MENA as this modular part of this
proof, you know, standalone proof and attestation part for broader Web3 development.
And finally, so for end- user growth and other grant programs,
as part of this sort of focus and scale down
on the foundation side,
we're gonna be stopping the remaining initiatives
on the MENA Foundation side
as we continue to transition more technical
and marketing and community responsibilities to O1 Labs.
We really just don't think it makes sense
to focus on user incentives
before we have like a better application stack
and more things that people can do with MENA.
So getting these apps to mainnet,
you know, getting the apps that we mentioned,
having a DEX with a different application environment,
things like Nori and the bridge,
ZKUSD, which is quite exciting, and ZKVote,
those sorts of things that are real fundamental building blocks
are pretty important while also strengthening the core infrastructure.
And I think that's what we want all of us as an ecosystem
to focus on even as the MENA Foundation is scaling down. All right,
and I'm going to hand it back to you, Brandon, to talk about just sort of what's next for O1 Labs,
and then I'll speak a bit about what's next for the MENA Foundation, and then I think we can get
into questions, and I'd love to have Will on stage to represent the community for those.
to represent the community for those.
Yeah, yeah, and I'll try and go quickly here.
So as I mentioned, we are really eager
to do a protocol upgrade.
And I just wanna like really briefly kind of talk
through different components of this.
So one is, I know, I'm sure
a lot of you remember the upgrade, the initial upgrade for the Berkeley hard fork took a very
long time and a lot longer than any of us wish it would have. What we're trying to do to learn from
that is to make basically all future upgrades much less complex and less risky.
And specifically, we wanna do that by actively
sort of automating as much of it as possible
and aiming for a really reliable cadence.
So the idea is we will ship the upgrade no matter what, even if some features aren't ready, they'll just make it in the next upgrade.
But rather than delaying the upgrade for the features, we'll just do the upgrade with the features that we have.
So Matthew from our team is posting in MENA Research, like by the time we're done talking,
it'll be there.
And there'll be tons of details of like kind of what,
at least like we at Owen Labs think could be like
really good features to include.
You know, the ones that we think are really high priority,
you know, are like decreasing slot time,
which has like a lot of performance knock on effects, increasing some of the limits with Zcaps, which again has a bunch of like performance knock on effects.
And then again, as I mentioned, automation.
So yeah, and there likely will be more, but it depends on the results of the MIP discussions,
obviously.
So, yeah, and then otherwise, you know, we're working closely with Josh and all of MENA
Foundation to figure out, you know, which responsibilities make sense for us to take
And we're, you know, we're excited to figure that out ASAP.
And that's sort of what we're, what Josh and I are actively working on together.
And, you know, I think like we, like in this kind of in between period, you know,
it doesn't make sense for us to like support some, for O1Labs anyway,
to support like really formal grand grant
programs but we will be providing support as best we can to specific teams on a case-by-case basis
so we don't lose momentum and still like get important stuff out there so yeah that's about
it off I'll pass it to you Josh yeah. Yeah, thanks, Brandon. Yeah, and I would say that, you know,
the singular focus for the MENA Foundation at this moment is making sure that that transition
to O of One is successful, and that we still retain the capabilities that we need to execute
on that much more focused vision for MENA. And what that means, I think, on the MENA Foundation side,
after that transition is complete.
So we've shared some blog posts in the past
about MENA ecosystem funding.
And really, that's what I think I've been calling
the decentralized treasury and what the focus
is meant to be on for us going forward.
So what you've seen in the past about MENA ecosystem funding is really going to be the
main work stream for the MENA Foundation after we've engaged in this successful transition
to O of one.
So it's going to be a much more scaled down and scoped down foundation to do that. And it will, you know, that will, we'll be able to talk about, talk about that in more depth later. But, but I did also want to, you know, acknowledge that there was a lot of work done behind the scenes around what a decentralized treasury could look like. But to be honest, it was pretty
slow and we didn't get, we didn't deliver on what I think we could have delivered on. And we need to
move much faster. So the team that was involved there is no longer part of the MUNA Foundation
and we're going to be setting up after this transition, a new team of trusted members across the ecosystem
while working hand in hand with O of One as well.
So the ultimate goal there is to have a treasury that
is entirely managed by token holders
through a governance process that implements on-chain voting.
So I suspect it's going to take a few iterations to get there
and a lot of community feedback. But I'm very optimistic that we can expect the V1 of the Treasury to be functioning and in production by the end of the year.
And if not by the end of the year, at least there is a solid plan in place that we can all agree to.
And in accordance with another hard fork that may be necessary in order to
implement it.
But that is, that is my goal.
Um, so, um, and I think like overall, um, so what, uh, Oh, sorry, excuse me.
Um, so what to expect, you know, next, I know we talked a lot of, a lot of this stuff, but just in summary, we're upgrading the protocol.
It's way overdue.
It's going to happen.
Brandon already talked about it, committed to timeline, and there's going to be a lot
more, as he said, you can check research for more details about the hard fork.
It should be posted immediately.
We're going to support a subset of like really critical ZK native applications
into production that we've already talked about.
And then we're going to finish that team transition over to O1 Labs.
And then the MENA Foundation is going to work ardently to set up the team
for the decentralized treasury.
and that will be our primary focus going forward.
And that will be our primary focus going forward.
So I think I'd love to get Will up here,
but he may be having technical issues.
So I think what I'm going to do until Will gets back
is just start on the questions
and then Will can be the voice of the community once Twitter
lets him be the voice of the community. Oh, you're back, Will? Let's see if...
Okay, I'm going to go ahead and jump in, and then, Will, once you get it sorted, we'll see,
jump in and then we'll once once you get it sorted we'll we'll see uh we'll get you on on the stage
um but i think the the top of mind question that we haven't covered here is what is the status of
the web node and rust node and i think brandon you are much more well suited to talk about that
yeah yeah happy to so um yeah so uh so first of all like like the Rust node and Web node,
I mean, it's the same code base,
but packaged in those two products
are both like amazing pieces of work.
The team, the OpenMena team has done
like an amazing job on these so far.
And, you know, the hard part here is like,
how do we roll these out in a way that keeps the,
keeps the network stable and, you know,
doesn't preclude us from, you know,
keeping like marching forward on, you know, all the other things that we need to do
in the protocol. And so, you know, what we think is like the best path to take here
is what I like to refer to as the ship of Theseus approach to this rust note. So bear with me. I just like this metaphor or this story. So there's
this Greek myth, I guess, called the ship of Theseus, or maybe it's like a philosophy
parable or something. But the idea is if you have a ship that's like made out of, you know, a bunch of different pieces of wood and then you get a crack in one piece of the wood.
So you replace it with a new piece and then you get another crack in a different piece and you replace that.
And over like 100 years of replacing different pieces of wood on the ship, you've actually replaced all of the ship with the new pieces of wood.
And so then the question is, like, is this the same ship?
Because at every step it was the same ship, but at the end it's,
it's a completely new ship. So,
so the idea is well, let's take the existing implementation of MENA and,
and you know, our, our testing and the testing of the
OpenMENA team has shown that different parts of the Rust implementation are really stable
and really ready and have huge performance and code maintainability wins with respect
to their twin modules in the existing implementation.
So the idea is like, let's take those pieces of wood, like those parts of the system, and
then bring them over.
And then just keep doing that over and over and over again until we end up with the new
ship of Theseus.
But at the same time, always having a single client that we can move fast on and making sure that all the components are really well tested and we've had confidence in them as we're shipping.
So that's the high level plan with how to get the node from zero to Rust.
with like how to get the node from zero to Rust.
And then like the web node side,
like obviously that's super, super important.
Like the dream of Mina has always been like,
you know, the protocol supports running on a phone
and running on a browser and running on all these devices,
but the actual implementation hasn't. And finally, we have an implementation that can. And we even saw it running on fridges
and cars and things on Twitter. So again, it's amazing work that the OpenMeeting team has gotten this mostly stable so far.
And, you know, but as I mentioned, we just want to get to this world in a way that's
really careful and doesn't stall other progress, and we make sure that everything remains stable.
So we're going to do it incrementally.
And maybe it's not as sexy, but it's safe and
it'll be sexy at the end. So we're really excited to, you know, partner with the Open
Bina folks and make that happen ASAP. Great. Yeah. Thanks, Brandon. I just got word that Will's audio setup is just being a giant
jerk. So he can't be the voice of the community because quite literally Twitter won't let him.
So we're going to keep going. And I'm just going to explicitly call out the questions.
One thing I also just wanted to mention, just so folks know where these questions are coming from, I think over the last like two weeks, we had, you know, public forum for folks to ask them.
And what we did is we just took the top. A lot of questions were kind of repeated or the same theme.
And we just took the top 10 questions from those. And that's where these are. These are coming from.
And we're we're trying to go through them in in priority. So sorry Sorry I didn't explicitly mention that from the get-go.
But anyway, I will be pseudo-Will as the voice of the community here too.
So can you tell us more, the second question is,
can you tell us more about how Project Untitled is related to
or complementary to MENA?
How can Project Untitled be used for ZK apps and ZK rollups on MENA?
So Brandon, I'm also going to hand this one over to you.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, so Project Untitled has a really interesting history.
So it was quite literally like born out of need from the MENA community. So like the actual kind of product was created out of demand
from MENA developers,
the cryptography behind the project was spawned out of research
from MENA work and the engineering on the project
is spawned from the code base of MENA.
So, and that kind of works in both ways.
So like, for example uh consensus
consensus upgrades were uh like that are are gonna make it to Mina were um designed and sort of
thought of because of like thinking in this new context but because it's sharing the code base
like these these uh this work uh is it's like you know pushing me forward as well so so this
like just to say like this this project is is part of the mina family um as like you know from its
foundations um so but to be to be like more specific like uh applications within within the
mean ecosystem tileville word word home Nori specifically, for example,
and a few others working on different pieces,
like all need some way to manage state
in a decentralized way.
And that is like exactly what this project
is set out to do.
So like, how specifically does it, you know, like exactly what this project is set out to do.
So like how specifically does it, you know, does it help ZK apps and ZK rollups?
Like ZK apps and ZK rollups don't have a mechanism
for working with decentralized state.
And, you know, this was again, one of those pieces,
it was a bit of an oversight of like,
okay, we built the foundation of a thing and we're like,
yeah, you need to figure out state somehow. But turns out there is no way to figure it out. There's
literally no project that can handle this problem. And so that's why we're working on it.
And I think there's like, it's also a really good opportunity, I think, to, to broaden the reach of, of MENA.
So for example, there's, there's projects in the AI agent space that, um, that have a need for state management as well.
And we're really excited to, to see how we can bring these into the, into MENA through this path, um, and then make MENA kind of more connected to the AI agent world.
Well, thanks, Will. Okay, the next question is, it's been a while since
Econ's design was announced as a tokenomics partner for, or economics design, I think that's
just the Twitter handle, was announced as a tokenomics partner for MENA.
Are they still actively involved?
And if so, why haven't we seen concrete outputs yet?
So this was a really well-timed question from the community
because we've actually just published the tokenomics report from them.
And you can find it on the MENA protocol blog, literally just this morning.
So what we'd like to do, and I do think that this falls into the scope of the overall
token, the overall decentralized treasury work that in addition to having the decentralized
treasury deployed, we need to make sure that our entire, you know, the system by which we have tokens and security on the protocol, we need to make sure that that is working and sustainable.
And I think even if we don't necessarily have full agreement across the community about what that looks like right now, we can all agree that the current status quo is not good and we need to fix it.
So what we'd like to do next is really work, this is going to be again post-01 transition,
but I'd really like to work together with the community to figure out what changes we should
enact. And so there are already some proposals from community members, but I definitely expect, I encourage and hope everyone will check out the report and share their thoughts here elsewhere.
So actually, it sounds like, Will, did you get your...
Hey.
Yay. There we go. There you are.
Okay. We've got the voice of the community back. Thanks, Will.
So I'll leave it to you to handle the questions from here on out.
Thanks, man.
Thanks.
Was the last one the tokenomics?
I was just restarting my phone.
Yeah, yeah.
I already just covered that.
So I think you're on the next one after that.
Okay, great.
Hey, everybody.
Sorry for the confusion there.
So the next question, which I think is a great one, is what's being
done to solve the performance bottlenecks in ecosystem tooling limitations? It's a big one.
Brandon, maybe you can answer that. Yeah. Yeah. Happy to. Yeah. So this, I think,
feeds into the protocol upgrade situation.
So I'll say it again.
I'm going to keep saying it over and over and over again.
We will ship a protocol upgrade this fall.
And and the question is, you know, what what should be in it?
Obviously, like that's that's driven by by MIPS and by community feedback. But we, at O1 Labs,
we're really excited to include performance improvements and make that really the focus of
this release because it's a huge, important problem, right? So specifically, you know, a few things that we've identified as, like, high priority that also are, you know,
we can have really high confidence that can make it into the release is, one, reducing slot time.
So this makes finality better, it makes throughput better, and it makes ZK apps more responsive.
It's like a win-win-win um another is uh zkapp account update limits um and again i mentioned this
earlier but if we increase the limits then it means you can do more in one account update and
you can have you know uh account updates are sort of part of a transaction so basically it means you
can do more for less.
You can do more in one transaction,
which again improves performance,
improves bottlenecks, improves tooling.
And, you know, there's a bunch of other,
like a bunch of other features that we're sort of calling out
in our MENA research posts that we'll post today.
So please like jump on that and give us feedback
and suggest other things as well.
Because yeah, we, you know, we really, we really want to like solve these things. And
like, most importantly, we want to like deliver quickly. We want to do something now. So yeah.
Thanks. Yeah. I think that's a great start.
And just from my perspective, I've been in the room with many different developers over
the course of the last couple of years where some of the core team has always said, we
know exactly what it takes needed to scale, but we haven't prioritized it.
And I think it kind of fits within the theme of this call in which before we were trying
to boil the ocean a little bit um to say like trying to
create the application environment build a new proof system build a proof sediment layer um
and all of these novel zk designs to make the system work together whereas now by leaning into
mina itself and making it making it work as that sediment layer um it's long overdue and it will be
it will be a huge relief to a lot of the people
working on the system and using it.
I know we're almost at the end of the hour.
I think there's a few more questions, which I think is important that we address, so I'll
keep going.
Thanks to everyone's patience.
Are there any plans to expand the current TypeScript stack and support more developer-friendly
environments or simplified front-end integrations?
This is to me, right?
Sure, yeah.
I mean, I can also, yeah.
Yeah, well, I'll take it, how that I spoke up.
Yeah, so the short answer is no.
You know, we have some prototypes with like a Rust front end.
But for now, like we want to narrow our scope
and focus on delivering like the most critical things.
And people are able to use the TypeScript stack
to do great things.
So we just want to empower them and make that stack more
performant and have more features for now.
Nice.
The next one I'm going to take myself,
which is what will become of the projects in the ecosystem which are starting to run out of
resources? Do we already have plans for the next stage of management around grants? And I know
there's even some people on the call who are in this position in which we've been running grant
programs for the last three years. And now through the transition where R1 Labs is taking more technical leadership, there's not a clear plan.
And I think first context, again, kind of talking to some of the stuff that Josh brought
up earlier, is by trying to do everything, we've spent a lot of time, energy resources,
not just from the Treasury, but also developer time of people who have been grinding in the
ecosystem, trying to make MENA work for many different purposes.
And with ZK, we know, like, especially at the application layer,
there's very, very, very few applications that exist across Web3
that can be just ported over from other ecosystems
because ZK is really used as infrastructure for large-scale roll-ups,
but for applications themselves, it's a very, very new
concept. And these people have been paving the way, but without an ecosystem of users, it's very
hard to run a business on MENA right now, especially if you're kind of paving the way in many new ways.
And so right now, we're taking a step back to just focus on a core subset of applications that we know are absolutely required,
either as infrastructure for other developers or a subset of kind of foundational applications that have a good chance of surviving as a business from day one.
And we want to make sure we're clearing the path for them to be successful no matter what,
no matter what because it's really like table stakes for the rest of the ecosystem to have
because it's really like table stakes for the rest of the ecosystem to have these in place.
these in place.
And so that means we have wound down a lot of the grants and the bigger grant programs
that we've been running and kind of are taking grants on a case by case basis with each team.
And so that's not an easy thing to do especially because there's a lot of people who have worked really hard on making MENA just a robust place with lots of different types of applications.
But we have to take a hard look at where we're at right now and just try to put our best foot forward for the sake of everyone and also new developers' times who are coming in.
So the answer is we're kind of taking it on a case-by-case basis.
If you're in the ecosystem and you have an application, we're probably already talking to you. But in
case you wanted to have that conversation around grants, reach out to me, reach out to Yeltsin,
reach out to Horesh, and we'll be having these conversations on a case-by-case basis over the
next couple weeks. Absolutely, the plan is to support across the ecosystem to support teams
with grants into the future, especially ultimately
with a fully decentralized treasury that people can vote on around how the treasury is distributed.
But for this intermediate time period, we're going to continue to take these on a case-by-case basis.
The next one, what's your realistic strategy for adopting beyond the crypto native audience?
Do you believe Mina's current state is ready for real world use cases um i i believe yes like the client-side proof generation
is still slow but it offers incredible new and important um options to developers when designing
applications around privacy and censorship resistance um Proof verification in applications we're seeing,
again, it's really like MENA's designing applications
using MENA as part of the application stack
is a brand new thing,
but I fully think that we haven't woken up to these designs
and there's a lot of opportunity around how they add
not just incrementally better value to applications out there,
but actually just completely new value.
And ZKVote and the ecosystem is a good example of this.
It was designed only to be possible using MENA as a proof verification machine
and ONJS as a language for proof aggregation.
And it gives you anonymity through client-side proof generation
and it also through ONJS and MENA Protocol have something called preconditions
that allow you to basically, in this case, allow anyone to run a sequencer,
which is critical for censorship resistance for counting votes.
So we've talked a lot about it, but this is a really good example
of something
that the world needs dramatically right now
and client-side proof generation
makes it uniquely possible.
Beyond that, I think there's still a whole lot
of opportunity for infrastructure across Web3
to transition to using more ZK native designs.
We're seeing this through Nori.
I think nori's
design um being relying on proofs rather than validators and networks is really like a horse
and buggy moment for bridging across web3 we're starting to see starknet do this settling to both
bitcoin and ethereum but mina mina's strength is really like low-cost proof verification
and mina serving as this place where you can kind of verify proofs,
have a ZK stack on top of it that allows you to do things with those proofs, plug, you know, Ethereum data into a voting application, stuff like that that doesn't really exist.
And other ecosystems, I think, you know, we don't really need to solve all the world's
problems, although ZK vote is a good example.
There's enough low-hanging fruit across Web3 when we see this world transitioning to ZK
architecture.
We just have to go out and get it.
There's a few partnerships which I can briefly touch on, if that's okay.
I spoke to Mirai SingularityNet, which was a partnership that was launched as part of our previous governance initiative.
We decided to put that on pause
indefinitely to narrow focus through this transition.
Mirai Assets, which was a proof of reserve, proof of concept that got built, but ultimately
wasn't adopted.
And I think it was usually, it was basically always positioned as a proof of concept and
is there on the shelf.
I think the GitHub is available, but we haven't decided not to take that further
in the current focusing of efforts.
ZKPID was also something that we've used for the MENA Foundation delegation program,
but we've also put that on pause again in this narrowing of focus because we think with this transition, we have one shot at getting the time and resource allocation right.
And when it comes to partnerships, we know we have a good subset of really strong builders in the ecosystem that we want to support.
We have a protocol upgrade that's coming.
We have a protocol upgrade that's coming.
And so partnerships in general, at least the ones that are currently out there, we're really focusing on the technicals and delivering this value back to the ecosystem.
And just to clarify, that was, I think, a broader question that was brought forward by the community about the state of partnerships, right?
That's why you're going in detail about these, right? Well, because folks just wanted an update. Yes, sorry? That's why that's how you're going in detail about these, right?
Well, because folks just wanted an update.
Yes, sorry, that's correct.
Anything to add there, Brandon or Josh?
Yeah, I'll just jump in and say,
you know, going forward, you know, for at least when,
I think moving forward, like1 labs is going to be
uh much more involved in in all of the the the partnerships um at least the at least ones that
have like a technical component and and you know we intend on really only um uh making announcements that uh like are sort of tied to you know projects that are that are
definitely going to succeed like we we we don't want to people to get their hopes up and then be
disappointed later to the best that we can control that yep makes sense um what are the marketing and
community priorities given everything?
I think we've covered some of this, but is there anything in terms of marketing and community that we haven't covered over the next couple of months?
Yeah, I'll start from the MF side, which I think should also be relatively clear after this call.
be relatively clear after this call, but after this transition is complete and O of One is
really taking ownership on the technical roadmap and on grassroots ecosystem development and
marketing and community, at that point, the singular priority for the MENA Foundation will
be setting up the decentralized treasury, which was previously called the MENA Ecosystem Fund,
and ensuring that it's set up in a way
that creates sustainable future success
for the ecosystem and the protocol.
So that is going to be our focus.
And we plan on, I think,
really trying to execute on that very, very quickly,
you know, as quickly as we can
once the transition is complete.
Brandon, what about on the O1 side?
Yeah.
And again, as part of this transition,
on the O1 side, we're going to be really ramping up
our marketing and community support functions
in our organization.
So yeah, as Josh and Will, and maybe myself has said earlier,
yeah, we really want to, you know, put a lot of energy into this. And I guess specifically,
you know, the marketing will support our technical development by explaining what Mina is, who it's
for, and like what you can expect in each delivery, as well as actively
engaging with the community as best we can and listening to them.
Thanks. Yeah, that makes sense. I want to just address one question in the comments that I think
is important follow-up, and I can talk to this one, which MP says, how do you want to incentivize
people to build something with here without any financial help? And I think this is a really important question because
from my perspective, we've been, you know, there's a little bit of a disservice in
continuously running grant programs at scale if the underlying mechanism to build a profitable
application or a application that's ready to scale isn't there yet.
And I think we're getting closer and closer to that. But by scaling back large-scale programs,
it's really about placing bets on the teams that have a higher chance of succeeding because they've
either built something before or they understand proof verification at the core of their application architecture. Ultimately, we need to go out and
find those teams as well. And I think Yasin and others from the MENA community team have been
really good about this deliberate growth. But we've tried the big scale programs. And what has
happened is people come from other areas of Web3 and they want to kind of port their application
over because they see that it doesn't exist on MENA.
But going back to where we started, that's because MENA was deliberately
designed differently to scale over the long term.
And we absolutely do need financial incentives.
And if you talk to some of the builders who are sticking around and who have
spent years, we've supported them along the way.
But it's really about making sure how we are deliberate about the path forward.
And then one last question. Thank you, you everybody for taking all this extra time um
is there an update on ledger signing uh thanks yeah thanks will um yeah so zondax has finished
development and oro is testing it in their wallet um but we'll we'll require ledger live to merge it
so this is a top priority to get done and we we'll be done, you know, either pre or post transition,
but there's ownership and commitment to getting it done for sure.
And yeah, just to echo what Will said,
I do want to thank everyone for spending the extra time.
Sorry we went over by a couple minutes,
but definitely thought it was important to get through these questions
and to make sure that the community knows that we hear them and that we're working toward
getting some of these things done, but also just to be open and upfront about the things that we
had made commitments to in the past. but as I think as Will alluded to,
and as many people have seen,
the reality of the situation is that we were overextended
and we were trying to do too much
and not really focusing on what makes MENA special
and unique relative to every other protocol out there.
And I think that what you can expect going forward
in general, just to sort of leave everyone on, you know, if you had to take away a few things from this conversation, the
biggest one is that MENA is entering into an age of renewed focus and commitment, and that everyone
should expect that O of One is going to be accountable to delivering on the technical
roadmap, that the MENA Foundation is going to be accountable toward delivering on a sustainable decentralized treasury for
the ecosystem to continue to grow.
And that is what we're here for.
And we're going to be as open and transparent as possible for all of that going forward.
So just take that to heart. And Brandon, by all means,
feel free to add to that. I just wanted to give everyone my closing spiel.
Yeah. Thanks. Thanks so much, Josh. Yeah. I mean, plus one to everything Josh said,
just like really, really concretely along that line, like the first step to showing our commitment to being accountable,
to executing, to everything against a technical roadmap.
There is a MENA research post live right now
where we talk about a lot of details
of like what kinds of features are in consideration
for the hard fork from our perspective.
Like, please engage on that.
And like we're full steam ad, you know,
working on different components of the hard fork
that will, you know, pending community vote
and all these things enable a protocol upgrade soon
to like move, you know, move me forwards
towards this new kind of more performant, stable, modular world.
Great. Awesome. Well, I think, I think with that, we're, we're,
we're really happy that we had the chance to have this,
this fireside chat could use a fire, I think.
Too bad you can't add that into Twitter spaces.
But yeah, thank you.
Thank you, Brandon.
Thank you, Will.
Thank you, everyone, for joining us.
And yeah, look forward to more updates.
I'm not allowed to say the word soon, I think,
because people seem to hate that.
So look forward to more updates at a future time is what i will say instead um yeah thank you so much josh and will and everyone thanks thanks y'all bye bye
