Dear Minimalists,
On April 5th, we hosted our fourth community call to share our progress and address your questions. We also crowned our community member of the month and heard more from him about how he first came across Minima.
You can find a recording of our call on Youtube here. We’re recapping some of the most important questions asked in this post and all the essential updates.
Jazmin (Technical communication) and Luke (Head of the community) took the stage, moderated by Naomi (Social Media Manager). Countless Minimalists joined us throughout our discussion. Thanks to everyone raising their hand to speak, and a special thanks to Yuri, who translated from Ukrainian to English for us.
What have you been working on the last month; Updates you’d like to share?
Jazmin: “I’ve been working on creating some documentation. I’ve been putting together the dev section on the new website, which you might have seen. It goes into details of the protocol, including what TX-Pow is, creating tokens on Minima, how to send and store coins, how mining works, and so forth. It’s all live, and you can check it here. It’s also been super exciting to see the ambassador program take off.”
Luke: “ There’s been quite a lot happening. Of course, we launched our new website and the new APK which has been very positively received. The ambassador program went live in its first iteration — and it’s fantastic to see every one of you engage with it.
In terms of node count, we are picking up pace. We went from 20k to 30k over 4 weeks, and today we’re reaching 40k nodes, which took us just about two weeks. So there’s definitely an acceleration that wouldn’t be possible without all of you. It’s incredibly humbling and exciting to see Minimalists engage and grow the community.”
Community Member of the Month
Note that the answers by Alexandr have all been translated by our community member Yuri and we’ve added the translated version here. For the original chat, you can always head to the recording!
Congratulations to our Community Member of the Month: Alexandr. Thanks for being part of our community and joining us today. Could you quickly introduce yourself and tell us how you learned about Minima?
Alexandr: “Great being here. It’s a pleasure. I am Alexandr and living in Ukraine. I first learned about Minima on the Kryptos Channel. I found it really interesting that Minima could be installed on the phone. And I didn’t have any previous experience with Blockchain, so Minima really is the first I am getting involved with. And the more I learn about Minima, the more opportunities I see for it. “
If you could build anything on Minima what would you build?
Alexandr: “ I am really interested in GameFi, so I hope that one day there will be various games and GameFi projects on it.”
What excites you about Minima?
Alexandr: “I really like the idea of decentralization that Minima can bring to the world, and I even believe that in the future we might not need other blockchains. Because everything can be done with and on Minima.”
Open Stage
Various speakers from the community joined us on stage and shared their thoughts, questions, and feedback. Thanks to all our speakers and apologies to those we couldn’t get on. We’ll see you next time!
Dima: “A shoutout to Alexandr, he’s been awesome. Minima was also one of the first crypto projects I got involved in through Youtube and the ambassador program. I believe that other blockchains like Ethereum and Bitcoin aren’t really decentralized, so I am very excited for Minima and the idea of bringing true decentralization.“
What were news or events in the last months you observed and found noteworthy?
Jazmin: “ The biggest thing we’ve seen recently is the Ronin sidechain hack on Axie Infinity. And to me, it feels that these are happening so frequently recently, because of decentralization lacking. And I hope that people are noticing that what they use isn’t decentralized and therefore also less secure.”
Luke: “That’s definitely been the main thing I’ve read about because I was so busy taking care of the community. What struck me about it was that it took them a week until they realized that they’d been hacked. It says a lot about trusting centralized entities with your money. You’d hope that they notice such things faster.”
Jazmin: “And it was also a member of their community flagging it; it wasn’t even them making the announcement in the first place.”
Luke: “Yes. It was a community member trying to withdraw and wondering why funds didn’t arrive.“
Dima: Will the Minima Blockchain be powerful enough to create DeFi and other dApps on it?
Jazmin: “When building dApps on Minima, we don’t expect the baselayer to scale to hundreds of thousands of transactions. That’s what our Layer-2 will be for. And then anything can be built on top of that L2 that offers cheap, nearly instant transactions.”
Bobon: I see many blockchain and crypto projects use referral programs to expand. My question is, did you expect the community to grow like this?
Luke: “ To be honest, we hoped it would but of course, we didn’t know. With a lot of these things, the only way to find out is to try. The reason is happening, I believe isn’t just the technology, but also the network. This is all of you, working together for a common goal because unlike in other PoW networks, there is no competing for mining rewards. I think that the culture you’ve all built of helping each other and having fun while doing it has created an environment full of good energy. And that then attracts more people to try it out and join.
So it’s not just about the technology, but also the people.”
Bobon: What is the size of the community?
Luke: “Node runners, we have just passed 40,000. And across all our other channels there are roughly 65,000 people.”
Bobon: And what is the percentage of nodes on mobile phones to other devices?
Luke: “Great question. I do not have the exact numbers, but we had one-third on mobile phones. This number has been growing steadily since the launch of the latest APK.”
Once you launch mainnet rewards will stop. Won’t that mean a lot of nodes will stop operating, and how do you mitigate that?
Jazmin: “ It’s important to remember that the network won’t be as now. Currently, we don’t have our MiniDapps on there. But once we have our wallet back, our chat app launched, and developers building games things will look very different. There will be so much utility from the network, that people would want to continue running nodes.
And then we also have partners lined up that aren’t interested in the price of the token, but in the utility it offers them. One area where we are getting quite a lot of interest is vehicle-to-vehicle communication.
We don’t think users will drop off. Quite the opposite. By the time we launch we will be growing exponentially, and we don’t expect that to just suddenly stop.”
Eldiablovol: How can you ensure that the Minima blockchain history won’t exceed a phone's available storage?
Jazmin: “There are two elements to the chain. The section of the chain that is not pruned so the entire chain. And then there is the cascading chain that keeps track of all of the Proof-of-Work that has gone into the chain. That is compressed, so very compact.
And alongside that, you have a mechanism to store proof of your coins. So everyone stores their own unspent outputs. You can think of it as a book. Everyone has the spine of the book, and their own page specific to them. When they want to spend their coins, they show their page and the rest of the nodes can validate that using the spine. So the chain doesn’t grow as the Bitcoin blockchain does. Of course, mobile phones’ storage capacities will also increase over time.“
Thanks to everyone who joined us for this call and all the questions and ideas we received!
You can find the full recording here.
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