Today we’re talking with Evan Shapiro, Co-founder and CEO of Mina Protocol. Evan has always been into programming and stumbled upon bitcoin in 2011. He says he was blown away as a programmer what a chain of trust through blockchain could mean for writing a program. He followed the space and was fascinated by the technology. It was in 2017 that an old high school friend started talking to him about cryptocurrency. It was clear to them both that something was technically not in place yet for crypto to take off in a big way. After thinking and talking about it a lot, Mina Protocol was started. Mina aims to build a privacy-preserving gateway between the real world and crypto.

Privacy is very important in decentralized finance. Transactions that go on-chain are public, people have to be able to verify your doing what you say you're doing, but that doesn’t work well for finance. Crypto apps need to know the info going into them, but with finance the info is very sensitive. Mine uses Snarks, a little proof of a computation. They’re very small and can be sent and checked cheaply. Furthermore, they can interact with things without revealing data.

Snapp’s are what will verify the information very efficiently on chain. Say you have a credit score on a website that you want to put on blockchain. You would want to do that without revealing your personal information. Snapp’s will prove the info is true. A new project, SnarkyJS, is going to be a way you can program Snapps, and it’ll be available in JavaScript. You’ll be able to write Snapps with privacy on your own screen.

Evan says he feels like we’re reaching a place where anyone can be anything. He’s inspired by the founder of Uniswap, Hayden Adams, who created something huge out of an idea and a small grant. Lucas says Mina has a lot of great partnerships such as Teller or Chainsafe. Together with Chainsafe they’re currently working on a version that makes it easier to cross compile. They also have an RFP ouw with Ethereum which will bridge the two. You’ll be able to launch your app on Ethereum and bring in features from Mina to put on your app.

If you’d like to learn more, find @minaprotocol on Twitter or visit minaprotocol.com. Find their Discord page for more technical conversations.