Zero-knowledge proofs have taken a giant step forward on Thursday with the launch of a $92 million token sale to speed up the Mina protocol’s adoption.
The round was headed by FTX Ventures and Three Arrows Capital, and it was FTX Ventures’ first venture in a zero-knowledge startup. Alan Howard, Blockchain.com, Amber Group, Brevan Howard, Finality Capital Partners, Circle Ventures and Pantera are some of the other companies taking part in the deal.
In a recent interview, Evan Shapiro, the CEO of Mina Foundation, said that “the main opportunity here is to be able to program with zero knowledge for regular developers.”
He also remarked that in the past, this has not been feasible. If you wanted to deal with zero-knowledge proofs, you had to be a cryptographer who also happened to be very talented at the kind of programming required. What’s particularly intriguing is that any developer familiar with JavaScript may now work with ZK proofs.
When asked about the price at which the tokens were sold and how much of the Mina Foundation’s funds were raised in the round, Shapiro declined to answer.
Grants are available via the program.
Ever since the network was soft-launched in December 2021, Shapiro claimed the team had been slowly ramping up its production.
He also added, “the main function of the raise is to increase our capacity to give out grants to proposals that can help support the protocol.”
So far, the foundation has funded around 1,100 or so grantees, and the team received more than 100 applications for its “ZK Bootcamp” app development program, from which the foundation selected a dozen to foster.
An identity management system, a number of games, and a “very scalable layer 2” system are among the promising zero-knowledge applications. Shapiro hoped to see these projects go into production within the next six months,
In addition, private decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) transactions and memberships, “a [decentralized finance] app that has a form of identity of private [know your customer],” and private non-fungible token (NFT) ownership are all highly sought-after features among users and developers alike.
Shapiro was also optimistic that zero-knowledge proofs are becoming something everyone can use rather than just a limited group of engineers. This is indeed an exciting thing for Mina and the space.