Deepthi

I joined @o1_labs in 2018 as the 4th employee, and after 7+ incredible years working with Brandon I’m deeply grateful for his leadership and for everything I've learned from him I'm excited to step into the role of co-CEO with @zkLawyer_ and continue building Mina’s future with our team & community

When I joined o1Labs in 2018, zk was hardly being discussed. Seven years later, the industry has caught up to what we have always believed: that the ability to verify without revealing is foundational, not optional. Five years on mainnet is a huge milestone for Mina, and for me it’s personal. I’m still as excited and challenged by what we’re building as I was on day one. With institutional demand for privacy-preserving infrastructure surging, there’s a whole new world ahead of us. To everyone who’s been part of this journey so far, thank you and cheers.

Interestingly enough I had the exact same conversation with @zkLawyer_ how ZK proofs might be the perfect solution for the massive bureaucratic corruption in India and the huge court backlogs. India needs to embrace technology for many of its complex societal challenges. Great to see @raghav_chadha take up these issues in the Indian parliament. Would love to discuss this more with your team !

@minacryptocom @bitbanter @zktrivo @dwillems42 @zkLawyer_ @MinaProtocol Thank you for bringing this up

The MIP process introduced by the foundation is to allow decentralized decision making, supporting the decentralized treasury management. However, I do agree that the changes in this HF are what the community has been wanting. And for that reason the development continued in parallel and was not blocked by the voting process. I like that we are open to some lighter-weight validation. Perhaps a forum post (with still the same level of details as an MIP) is sufficient to assess any objection and reserve the full MIP review process for proposals where community sentiment is unclear or contested. It’s still a bit loosely defined when a full MIP is warranted but definitely something we can assess for future hard forks, in conjunction with the decentralized treasury setup

Here's my thoughts on the last MIP's and voting. As someone like you @bitbanter @zktrivo @deepthiskumar8 @dwillems42 @zkLawyer_ who cares passionately about @MinaProtocol I hope it is taken in a constructive way and not as criticism. Mina is at a crucial time, the price is consistently down, core team members have left and general 'community' sentiment is negative. I feel like we could have saved a lot of time and work and applied these updates instead of creating a vote where all the MIPs will be unanimously supported. MIPs can be an important part of Mina's future for contenscious upgrades but for now every second is vital. WDYT?

great energy at India Blockchain Week 🇮🇳 ran a workshop on Mina + o1js, a few takeaways: - many people still haven’t heard of Mina and are genuinely amazed by what it can do - devs were surprised how approachable o1js feels vs other zk toolkits - tons of talented, hungry builders looking to contribute to zk

Mesa Testnet is now LIVE. Mina’s next major upgrade enters its first public phase today. This is a pre-flight testnet opened early so the community can begin testing Mesa’s new features. 🔗 minaprotocol.com/blog/mesa-test…

@kashvii Thanks so much — glad it resonated!

banger ZK keynote from @deepthiskumar8

@heyibinance Congratulations @heyibinance! As someone who stepped into a co-CEO role a few months ago, I know how energizing this can be. Excited to see what you and @_RichardTeng build together.

Still the same Chief Customer Service Officer, at your service. I will keep up the hard work! Thank you all for your trust in me. 客服小何感谢大家的支持，我会继续努力的！

What a day at @IBWofficial! Talking to @NPCI_NPCI (a government org) devs and officials about privacy-preserving applications was not on my list.

@mert @fede_intern Thank you for spearheading it

ty to all the sponsors for making this possible

we are live the first ever zcash zypherpunk hackathon starts now insane judges, prizes, and eternal glory tracks for builders, data analysts, and even content creators 300k in prizes as well as startup funding and even free tickets to the network state school enjoy!

Meet the @o1_labs team at @EFDevconnect, talk zk, ask how you can build with Mina- whether you’re curious about recursive zk-SNARKs or building privacy-preserving apps.

We’re teaming up with @Zcash to sponsor the Zypherpunk Hackathon — where privacy, proofs, and programmability collide 🔐✨ Here’s how builders can win $20K+ in MINA prizes👇 Explore our challenges

A bit late on this one but… sorry not sorry

Let’s go!

Zypherpunk hackathon is live! Checkout the mina-specific tracks

Mina represent a fundamental architectural shift in how blockchain systems are built - Privacy-preserving zk applications with off-chain execution and on-chain verification - Succinct chain Come, build with Mina. Leverage the infrastructure the ecosystem has built. @o1_labs is committed to supporting you.

@dwillems42 @zktrivo lol

@zktrivo I hope the season won't be succinct.

it’s not only zk season it’s also succinctness season

@xamystar @mert Sure

@deepthiskumar8 @mert via dm?

the last 1,000x thesis the reason I call privacy the last 1,000x or the last PvE is not just for a soundbite (though it's also that) it is based on fairly obvious, emergent market asymmetries and gaps, along with the right timing on macro this includes ZK, but is not limited to ZK, and also includes mixers, FHE, and MPC a brief sequence of events: - Bitcoin started as a cypherpunk movement for internet money as a response to the 2008 financial crisis - it was novel, anarchist, and unproven — no one knew if it would work, and so the race to gain legitimacy was on - as it gained popularity, there were 2 large criticisms of Bitcoin: the lack of programmability (and scale) and the lack of privacy - Ethereum was started to tackle the lack of programmability, and then Solana was started to tackle the lack of scalability in programmability - this is what we have seen play out for the past 5-8 years in crypto, along with Bitcoin gaining legitimacy - improvements will continue to happen on the programmability/scale branch and the Bitcoin branch, but I'm not sure we'll see another 1,000x improvement - that is to say, I think future improvements are marginal, not order of magnitude in scale - on the other hand, Zcash was created to tackle the other branch of criticism. the lack of privacy - if you imagine the technological tree in civilization, it aimed to progress along the privacy branch - the privacy criticism was widely acknowledged by the likes of Satoshi (who cited Zooko on the first Bitcoin post) and Hal Finney in public forums - in those years, you had to get around the big problem in digital cash, the double-spend problem - to get around the double-spend problem, you had to make sure that everyone saw everyone else's balances - at the time Satoshi was open to adding ZK to Bitcoin for privacy, but did not know how to get around this problem, the tech was very new. he publicly states this in the early Bitcoin forums that this would allow for a better, simpler Bitcoin - the tech was so new in fact that Zcash was the first team on earth to ship ZK to production. not just in crypto, but in any industry! - but again, the tech was too new and hard to work with, and required many iterations to get right and get rid of trust assumptions, so the project struggled - which brings us to today. where ZK tech finally works. and where the brand of scale/programmability has reached the upper bound of the technological S-curve. - Bitcoin has gained legitimacy and Solana/Ethereum have proven programmability has PM, the privacy branch is the last piece remaining - it is also extremely timely. crypto has largely been dominated by speculative and commercial interests as of late, but crypto was started by the cypherpunks and the cypherpunks' aim was to build systems of liberty and privacy using cryptography and code - we are at that stage now - combine this with the macro environment of debt crises, the fact that non-state money has clearly been proven to work with Bitcoin, and the colossal abuses and breaches of power and privacy all over the world spearheaded by Europe, this is the time where privacy and ZK will start eating the world as well as newer forms of digital SoV - specifically a private internet-native SoV using advanced cryptography like ZK - these fields are also some of the only fields difficult, impactful, and novel enough to suck away meaningful talent from AI; and once this is realized, much more capital will go towards them cypher/acc

@xamystar @mert Send me a brief overview or the link to your discord message? so that I can connect you to relevant people

@deepthiskumar8 @mert yea! i dropped an idea there some days back but i'm yet to get a response.

@xamystar @mert Are you on Mina protocol discord?

@deepthiskumar8 @mert hey @deepthiskumar8, i have an idea i intend to build using o1js, i don't seem to know who to reach out to. i will be grateful, if/when you grant me a pitching audience. :)