Dear Mina community,
Today I am immensely proud to join you in celebrating the mainnet launch of Mina — the world’s lightest blockchain. This has been the most exciting and humbling day of my career to date, and it’s been an honor to lead the incubation period of a blockchain with the potential to transform the future of distributed ledger technology.
When Izaak and I founded O(1) Labs back in 2017, our vision was to use cryptography to build systems that put people in control of their digital lives. Much of today’s interactions with computers are not on our own terms; our personal data is mined for corporate profit, and users are often forced to rely on centralized entities to verify and protect their private information.
Our goal was to build a crypto protocol that truly gives people the tools to build more empowering and useful crypto systems, which in turn could strengthen computational and financial verifiability. We wanted to ideate a solution to heavy blockchains and build the first succinct chain that enables true decentralization at scale. And with Mina Protocol, we’ve made major steps towards achieving that. But we couldn’t have done this alone.
When we embarked on this journey, we quickly realised it would take much more than just our input to achieve this goal. In the space of four years, many talented minds joined our mission, and our team and community grew rapidly. Mina now has more than 100,000 supporters and validators in over 120 countries, providing a secure backbone for the network we see today. Community members have spent thousands of hours testing and enhancing the protocol, building smart tools to help the network and ecosystem flourish.
We saw our testnet participation grow from dozens to more than 4500 people during Testworld, making our adversarial testnet the largest public PoS network outside of Ethereum 2.0. More than 1000 validators took part in Testworld, helping to boost the iteration speed over its 12 releases and refine the code.
Mina is powered by participants, and the protocol’s success is only possible because of its community; a collective group of passionate and enthusiastic people, from cryptographers to developers, community builders to meme connoisseurs. Each and every community member has played a pivotal role in preparing Mina for mainnet.
The road to launching Mina was not without challenges, but we overcame the difficulties together, and we are incredibly grateful to each and every one of you for putting everything you have into making Mina what it is today.
Building Mina has been an incredible journey and today marks the beginning of a new chapter. I’m deeply excited to see Mina launched into the world and witness all of the amazing tools and platforms that will be built upon it. As we move forward, the Mina Foundation will pick up the stewardship of the protocol and the O(1) Labs team will continue to support Mina’s decentralized ecosystem in new ways, alongside the dedicated core community who has contributed so much to Mina. I want to thank each and every one of you for sharing today’s protocol launch with us. Here’s to the future of Mina.
–– Evan Shapiro
O(1) Labs CEO | Mina Foundation board member
