Mina Ecosystem – The infrastructure puzzle is still incomplete

How is the Mina ecosystem currently in the development stage? What are the next steps of this ecosystem? Where are the investment opportunities?

For all ecosystems, it takes time to build a solid foundation first to attract more developers, more users, and create a big buzz in the market.

This time for retail investors is often not cherished, because of less price volatility and less opportunity for speculation, but this time is extremely important in shaping the entire ecosystem later.

Mina Protocol is a relatively short-lived ecosystem, but has also attracted considerable attention from investors.

Today, I will work with you to find the most overview of the system, understand what the next steps of this ecosystem will be, thereby looking for investment opportunities.

About Mina Blockchain

What is Mina Protocol?

Mina Protocol claims to be the world’s lightest blockchain, with a vision of becoming a global payment system.

The goal of Mina Protocol is to solve the scalability problems existing in current blockchains, where the cost of verifying transactions increases proportionally to the total volume of transactions.

Mina’s goal is to design a decentralized payment system that provides the ability to have an original system history that cannot be manipulated due to the following properties:

• Using zk-SNARKs technology;
• Using Ouroboros Samasika – a secure PoS consensus protocol;
• Parallel scanning technology to improve transaction execution time.

Overview of Mina

Mina Protocol Highlights

Mina Protocol has the following outstanding features:

• Lightest blockchain in the entire crypto market: 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.
• Blockchain interacts with the rest of the internet: 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 of user information: 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.

Outstanding parameters

The outstanding parameters of the Mina blockchain (October 30, 2021):

• Consensus Mechanism: Proof-of-Stake, Zero Knowledge Proofs;
• Validators active: 451;
• Current block number: 75,805;
• Wallet number: 69,107;
• Market Cap: $1.3 billion;
• Status: Mainnet March 23, 2021.

Investors

The Mina project has a lot of big investors: Multicoin Capital. C+C, Naval, Coinbase, IOSG, Paradigm,… and many other investment funds. These investment funds will play an extremely important role in supporting the development of Mina Protocol in the future.

Founder develops the project

To look at a project and evaluate its potential, especially for startups, looking at the project founder is always one of the most effective ways. Here, I will learn a little bit about the founder of the Mina project with you:

• Studied Bachelor of Computer Science from 2011 to 2014, studied Master of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University from 2014 to 2015;
• Worked as Software Engineer Intern at Mozilla from June to August 2013;
• Worked as CEO of O(1) Labs from June 2017 to August 2021, then O(1) Labs became Mina Foundation and then CEO of Mina Foundation from then to present.

As you can see, the profile of CEO Mina Foundation does not have too many impressive achievements, and there are also quite a lot of empty time when it is not clear where he worked during that time.

But it can be clearly seen that the CEO of Mina Foundation is relatively purely technical and does not have much experience in the financial industry.

Stages of the Mina Ecosystem

In general, the Mina ecosystem is in its very early stages. The new mainnet project has not been long since (7 months), and is in the first stages of development.

Recently, there have been a number of notable events/organizations in the Mina ecosystem to promote its development. I will talk more about these events and developments in the lower part of the article.

Mainnet and launch of staking tokens MINA

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.

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 cooperates with Polygon

In early September 2021, Mina announced a partnership with Polygon. Accordingly, they will deploy an application bridge between the two platforms, so that applications on Polygon can enjoy the security quality of Mina and the power of the zkSNARKs algorithm.

The types of applications that can be built on Polygon after this combination include:

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

Contract worth $1.2 million with =nil; Foundation

At the beginning of October 2021, the Ethereum Foundation and Mina Foundation created a contract worth $1.2 million with the team =nil; Foundation to develop Mina’s SNARK Pickles on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

Offering capabilities include:

• Allows Mina smart contracts to be verified on Ethereum and other EVM blockchains like Polygon,…
• Allow dapps on other chains to access decentralized applications powered by Mina’s zk-SNARK (Snapps);
• Allows users to access features such as data verification, privacy security, secure identity verification,…

This is a big step towards building a two-way bridge between Mina and platforms including Ethereum and EVM-compatible blockchains.

With this development, the Mina Foundation aims to develop a permissionless bridge between different blockchains, leveraging the security of zero knowledge proofs to reinforce the assurance of cross-chain state.

Details: Mina Foundation awarded $1.2 million contract to =nil; Foundation

Identify

The current Mina ecosystem is still very new, does not have many applications and is still in the first stage of development. Infrastructure pieces also have not appeared much, including oracles or data index solutions, data statistics dashboards, API solutions, …

Therefore, in the coming time, what this ecosystem needs to pay attention to is to develop infrastructure pieces to help the ecosystem develop, because a high-rise building is only stable when it has a sufficient foundation good.

In addition, as an ecosystem using the OCaml programming language – a programming language not too familiar to Web3 developers – Mina needs to make a lot of efforts to attract developers to the platform.

In the near future, maybe they will launch hackathons with a moderate amount of prizes to attract the developer community, or offer EVM hybrid solutions to bring Dapps on EVM compatible platforms to Mina.

Learn more: What is an EVM? Will the EVM Blockchain Empire keep its unique position forever?

Epilogue

MINA is currently trading on exchanges: Binance, Gate.io

Hopefully, through the above article, you have had a better overview of the fledgling ecosystem named Mina.