Zero-knowledge proof adoption goes one step further today as the Mina Foundation announced a $92 million token sale to accelerate the adoption of altcoin project Mina Protocol (MINA). Terms of the token sale were not disclosed, but FTX Ventures and Three Arrows Capital are spearheading this investment. For details, continue reading Kriptokoin.com.
Altcoin project managed to receive investment from giant companies
Fundraising round was led by FTX Ventures and Three Arrows Capital. The investment represents FTX Venture’s first support of a zero-knowledge proofs project. Other contributors include Alan Howard, Amber Group, Blockchain.com, Brevan Howard, Circle Ventures, Finality Capital Partners and Pantera. Evan Shapiro, CEO of Mina Foundation, said in an interview:
The main opportunity here is for regular developers to be able to program with ZK proof. Historically, this was not possible. To work with ZK proof you had to be a cryptographer who was super good at the kinds of programming you needed. What makes it exciting is that any developer who knows Javascript can now work with ZK proof.
Evan Shapiro declined to share the price at which the tokens were sold or the percentage of Mina Foundation treasury represented by the round.
What is the purpose of the investment program? According to
Evan Shapiro, the network was soft-launched in December 2021 and the team has been slowly ramping up production since then. “The primary function of this investment is to increase our capacity to support proposals that can help support the protocol,” Shapiro says. So far the fund has accepted ‘about 1,100’ grants and the team has received more than 100 applications for the ‘ZK Bootcamp’ app development program, which the foundation has selected to train a dozen of them.
The first group includes an identity solution, multi-games and a ‘highly scalable layer-2’ and Shapiro said he expects many of them to go into production within the next six months. Other promising ZK apps include ‘a DeFi app with some kind of private KYC identity’, private DAO transactions and memberships, and private NFT ownership, all of which are frequently requested features among users and developers. Evan Shapiro says:
This is a special moment when ZK proofs become something people can use in general, not just electing developers. This is exciting for MINA and space.
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