Mina Ecosystem - An ecosystem in the early development stage

Mina Protocol is a name that has gained a lot of attention in the Vietnamese community in particular and the Cryptocurrencies community in general as the lightest blockchain up to date. Since its launch, there have been many times the project has entered the top trending searches on Coingecko to show its popularity.

Mina is up 586% since ICO price and 3600% from its ATH price making it one of the highest ROI projects on Coinlist.

However, MINA's ecosystem is still in the development stage and not yet complete. This article will give you an overview of the development process of the MINA ecosystem to capture valuable insights in the future.

What is Mina Protocol?

Mina is the world's lightest blockchain, authorized by the network participants themselves. Instead of applying brute force, Mina used advanced cryptography and zk-SNARK to design an entire blockchain that is about 22kb in size, the size of a few tweets, ushering in a new era of possibilities for blockchain.

The key to Mina Protocol is the incorporation of zk-SNARKs, which stands for “zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge. This feature allows the network to operate without verifying a transaction with every block that is created.

With unique security features and the ability to connect to any website, Mina is building its own portal between the real world and cryptocurrency, and MINA token functions as a utility coin and medium of exchange. 

Highlights of Mina Protocol

The idea behind the protocol itself is unique, and it solves most of the problems that modern blockchains are facing. The project stands out among other blockchains because of the following outstanding features:

• Lightweight: Mina uses a chain of about 22 kb so that participants can quickly synchronize the entire network. Mina is designed to be scalable while preserving the highest levels of resiliency, privacy, and security for users, and without compromising on decentralization.
• Interoperability: Real-world information is limited to Blockchain applications. To solve this problem, Mina can interact privately with any website. Anyone can use real-world data in computers, make decisions to change the way they live and work, without compromising privacy.
• Security and Decentralization: Mina helps users to have control over their own data. Not even the parties providing Dapps or services can control the data of their users.
• Utility: the MINA token could see further utility and value if Snapps earn widespread adoption across the blockchain community.

Mina Highlight Numbers

• Main Currency: MINA
• Marketcap & FDV: $779M & $1.8B
• Rank: #103
• Price ATH, ATL: $9 & $0.9
• Circulating Supply: 396,063,243
• Total Supply: 898,594,012
• Major exchanges listed: Binance, Kraken, OKEx, MEXC, Gate.io…
• Blockchain Size: 22kb (fixed)

Team

Mina is managed by the Mina Foundation, a public utility corporation headquartered in the United States.

The key members of the project are as follows:

• Evan Shapiro: CEO of Mina Foundation, and founder of O(1) Labs. He did an internship at Mozilla for 3 months and then became the CEO of O(1) Labs to the present time.
• John Cincinnati: Former Executive Director of Zcash Foundation (A very famous project previously working on Privacy).
• Jill Carlson: Principal, Graduated from Harvard and Oxford universities. Experienced working as a Business Development and Venture Partner.

The key members of the project besides Josh who has worked at Zcash and Jill Carlson who has experience in investment are not too prominent.

Partners & Investors

Investors and partners are always important factors to help the project develop and become successful. Mina acquired highly respected  and successful partners in the market such as:

• Coinbase Ventures.
• Hashkey.
• IOSG Ventures.
• Polychain Capital.
• Three Arrows Capital.
• Paradigm.

In addition, in the process of formation and development. The project has undergone a number of successful capital calls as follows:

• Apr 5, 2019: $15.M raised from Seed Round.
• Oct 21, 2020: $10,9M raised in a Venture - Series Unknown Roud.
• May 5, 2021: $18.7M raised through an ICO event.

The project has raised a total of$44.7M in funding up until this day. This proves that Mina Protocol has attracted a lot of investors to help the project development in the future.

Roadmap

As the project is fairly new and just launched its mainnet in Q1 of 2021. Therefore, Mina's platform is still in the preparatory stage for development. In 2021, Mina Protocol had Sale Token programs and developed necessary applications for the development of the future ecosystem such as Snapps or Bridge over Ethereum (the largest ecosystem in the market).

In the next section, we will dive deeper into important updates of the project to evaluate its potential in the future.

Mina Development Process

In general, the Mina ecosystem is in its very early stages. The project just launched over a year and this is the first stages of development.

Recently, there have been a number of notable events/organizations in the Mina ecosystem to promote its development.

Mainnet Launch (3/3/2021)

This is the first and relatively basic step for any platform that is just starting to develop after the Mainnet. After the mainnet in March 2021, the staking function was launched to increase the security and decentralization of the network.

The actual mainnet was launched and monitored to achieved these goals:

• The network must be stable.
• No critical alerts occur, that are necessary to deploy a fix for.
• The chain quality must be sufficient. If the chain quality is insufficient due to low participation, then the RC will not graduate into the mainnet. 

After the mainnet in March 2021, the staking function was launched to increase the security and decentralization of the network. Currently, with the staking rate approaching 90%, the interest rate of 6% a year, MINA is having a relatively high staking rate, making the Mina network better secure from decentralization or negative impacts. extreme from manipulation.

Mina announced the partnership with Polygon (13/09/2021) 

Mina and Polygon are working together to bring enhanced scalability, privacy, verifiability for the DeFi economy. This partnership means that developers building applications on either side can leverage these features through a SNARK based zero-knowledge protocol created by Mina which provides greater security than other similar technologies while still maintaining a high level of performance at minimal cost

Mina Protocol will be seamlessly integrated into Polygon’s Proof Of Stake Network (POS) allowing users access not just its fast speeds but also their anonymity during transactions. Here are some potential dapps that can be built on top of Polygon by leveraging Mina’s zero-knowledge SNARK-enabled protocol:

• DeFi platforms that require KYC can privately and securely obtain user information using Mina’s Snapps (zero knowledge-SNARK-based powered apps).
• NFT builders who want to keep certain elements private, such as ownership data, can use Mina to do that.
• Social Media dapps can verify that the user exists without asking them to share the PII.

This event is a major milestone for the Mina Foundation to share Polygon’s dream of a fully decentralized ecosystem of dapps empowering users with control over their own data privacy. This partnership is worth watching in the future as Polygon is one of the largest Layer-2 scaling solutions on Ethereum.

Award a contract worth 1.2 million USD to = nil; Foundation (1/10/2021)

After a rigorous selection process, The Ethereum Foundation and the Mina Foundation have decided to award a $1.2M contract to the Crypto3 team at =nil; Foundation to verify Mina’s Pickles SNARK on the Ethereum Virtual Machine.

This may permit Mina to be verified on Ethereum, and different EVM primarily based chains comparable to Polygon, permitting dapps on different chains to entry Mina’s zk-SNARK-powered decentralized functions (Snapps). Also, giving them entry to the options comparable to privateness preservation information verification, environment-friendly proofs of enormous computations, and secure logins.

Verifying Mina on Ethereum is also a step towards building a bi-directional bridge between the platforms. This full bridge will enable more accessible trustless verification of the Ethereum account state and Ethereum dapps through Mina full nodes on browsers and mobile devices. 

Latest Updates (8/2/21)

Mina ecosystem contributors shared their latest progress and updates to keep the community informed.

• Auxiliary Proof Generator: The platform implemented all the Pickles/Kimchi verification circuits, so when the final proof generator implementation comes in, the full auxiliary proof generator can be considered ready.  At this stage, Mina state proof preprocessing stage will be ready and third-party applications willing to implement Mina-Ethereum hybrid applications will be welcomed to begin the integration.
• In-EVM Verification: The project has already achieved first in-EVM verification deployment on Ethereum’s Ropsten. There are still adjustments to be made, however, the gas fee was significantly reduced.
• Snapps Update: Snapps is one of O(1) Labs’ main priorities, and there have been some recent progress and updates on this front. In Q4 of last year, the team led a Snapps Workshop in collaboration with ZK Hack, and hosted a Snapps Bootcamp to engage with developers interested in building zero-knowledge applications. 
• Improving Node Stability: The team has shipped a few releases in the last several weeks, which have improved node stability for node operators. However, there are still small issues that need to be addressed and fixed.
• Zk Oracles: This project was formerly called ‘WebSnapps’, but it has been renamed to Zero-Knowledge (ZK) Oracles to describe the effort to move public, real-world data on-chain using HTTPs and without building special intermediaries.
• Chainsafe: Chainsafe is working on the reimplementation of Mina in Rust, with the goal of making the network more resilient with an alternative implementation. The team is working on enabling this in browser and embedded environments. Most recently, we completed serialization, which allows users to be able to serialize/deserialize a block from the Mina mainnet.
• Update on Ledger: Hardware wallet Ledger has recently shared that the Mina App 1.0.6 is now available in developer mode on Ledger Nano X and Nano S. Ledger is currently working on an audit, although Least Authority has recently audited the Mina Ledger application.

In addition, the product priorities in 2022 were published by the team to update on existing projects.

Conclusion

The current Mina ecosystem is still in the early stages when projects have not appeared in the ecosystem. This is understandable when even the protocol itself is constantly releasing updates to make the system more stable.

Infrastructure projects also have not appeared, the reason as I mentioned above. However, once the platform of Protocol is stable and infrastructure projects emerge, this is an ideal place for dApps to start being deployed on Mina.

We already know that Mina is one of the projects that is heavily supported by the community and regularly enters the trending searches on Coinecko in 2021. Therefore, once the ecosystem starts to have the first projects, I think there will be many investment opportunities here.

To conclude, that is all you need to know about Mina Protocol and its early-phases ecosystem. We hope you’ve gained valuable insights to understand the future potential and find opportunities in the crypto market, especially about the Mina Protocol.