----- Departing Mina ----- Earlier this year the Mina Foundation board decided to transfer responsibility for Mina to o1labs, the technical team behind the initial launch of the protocol, and scale down the responsibilities of Mina Foundation. As a result, myself, and the majority of the employees of the Foundation, have left our roles, while o1labs has taken over responsibility for Mina. There is a lot I want to share -- but to put it simply, there was a substantial disagreement amongst the core ecosystem on how best to proceed with building Mina. I want to be clear that, as the founding CEO of the Foundation, and the co-founder and former CEO of o1labs, scaling down the foundation and reorienting the strategy in this way is not the direction I wanted to take. I worked on Mina for 8 years, and while some times were challenging, I loved the work we were doing, and intended to continue. With the Foundation now scaling down, and responsibilities transferred to o1labs, it is no longer possible to continue at the Foundation. My focus now is on taking the many experiences and learnings from the years, and seeing how to best apply them to work going forward. While it is not the direction I would have chosen, I wish o1labs the best in carrying the protocol forward. The engineers there have a vision for Mina, and while it differs from my own, I know they have conviction in it, and will work towards it in earnest. This has, however, left me in an unexpected situation - possessing deep domain knowledge of the tech behind Mina, believing in the original promise and vision of the technology, and having the benefit of 8 years of learnings. But, no longer at Mina Foundation or o1labs, and having to consider what to do next. ----- Building Protocols with Wider Participation in Decentralization ----- When I started thinking more deeply about cryptocurrency protocols many years ago, the thing I was most excited about, and ultimately co-founded Mina for -- was the opportunity to take the open participation in decentralization in early bitcoin -- and scale it to a much larger user base and network. We founded O(1) Labs and Mina on an approach that solved many of the core technical challenges to scaling decentralization. By applying recursive zero-knowledge proofs, we enabled constant-time blockchain verification, regardless of chain length or transaction count. This was one of the earliest applications, maybe the first, of using zero-knowledge proofs for scaling blockchain verification. Bringing this to production involved overcoming many other core challenges, including shipping the first succinct blockchain, the first recursive ZKPs in production, and an early ZK proof marketplace. However, a key challenge that plagued the technology, and through that Mina too -- was what to build on top of the protocol to properly take advantage of it. This was a key area we were thinking about at Mina Foundation in the last few months before these decisions were made. I was very excited by the progress we were making on a possible direction for this, with a zk-webnode developed by an internal MF team just having entered community testing. It felt like we were close to realizing a solution to combining the democratizing potential of the zk webnode technology, with a product and incentive strategy that would be able to take advantage of it. ----- What Comes Next ----- While this was a direction and strategy that we were excited about, with the decisions that have been made, pursuing it is something that is no longer possible for us at Mina. To carry forward this vision, a group of us have formed a new, smaller team, and are working on a new protocol built with a narrower focus around user-operated nodes. We'll be basing the design for the protocol around a new strategy for product and incentives, to scale the technology to a much wider userbase, with an initial focus around a narrower DeFi use case. Beyond that, there will be other changes from the many learnings over the years, including a product and user-first focus, and return to community engagement more similar to the early days at Mina. We're going to remain in stealth, as we build out the first version of what we think a blockchain built around user-operated nodes, focused initially on DeFi and user growth, can look like. But we look forward to talking to you all about it more very soon. Until then, feel free to reach out if you want to talk 1/1, and we'll be working on building what we think could be possible here.