To the Mina ecosystem, When I joined the community 3 years ago, the future was bright. @o1_labs had shipped mainnet the previous year, solidifying Mina’s role as pioneers in zero knowledge cryptography by launching the first production zk rollup AND designing the first decentralized prover marketplace (Snarketplace). Around that time, Mina Foundation spun out of o1Labs to steward the Mina brand, community and treasury. I wasn’t here yet, but I understand the rationale to decentralize the core teams’ decision-making. Mina’s strength is its cheap, fast verification of zk proofs, which means that it can and should be the most decentralized network out there. The team structure should reflect that. In retrospect, it was too early to separate the team building from the team marketing the product. To give an example, I ran developer-focused grant programs to get apps built with Mina’s tooling. We marketed zkApps as ‘private smart contracts’ and tried to recruit from the Ethereum ecosystem. In reality, the development environment on Mina is vastly different from Ethereum. Mina doesn’t have self-executing contracts, nor does it store state on-chain. There was a lot of excitement, but developers ended up spinning their wheels trying to use a toolkit that wasn’t ready for them. We learned and iterated along the way, but there was too much time, energy, and funding churned in the process. We ran these programs independent of o1Labs, and while we all wanted to work more closely together, organizational inertia consistently got in the way. 3 years later, the frustration that the Mina community feels can be explained by Conway’s law, which states that the structure of a system is determined by the social structure of the organization that designs it. Phrased differently, products mimic organizational structures. The early L1 successes were shipped by one unified team, and we’ve struggled since then. I’m now confident that had the teams been under one roof, we would have communicated to better define what Mina was, who it was for, and how developers could use it. While there’s a lot of work ahead, today’s news is a step in the right direction. I believe o1Labs' public, technical leadership is long overdue, so we can put the organizational friction behind us. Josh’s experience in helping unify the Cosmos ecosystem is what Mina Foundation needs for an interim CEO, and the path to a decentralized treasury is clear. Most importantly, Mina is infinitely scalable in its design. It scales O(1) in number of transactions and blocks, and O(n) in number of accounts. This is the only design that allows a decentralized network to avoid centralization over time and usage. Vitalik recently said that the Beam Chain proposal is trying to replace Ethereum’s current design with something like Mina’s design, “a zk-friendly minimal, simple, beautiful L1 from scratch,” but it’s likely to take 5 years. o1Labs shipped this same design over 4 years ago… let's see what Mina can do with o1Labs stepping back into the driver's seat. A special thanks for all of the Mina supporters, developers, and node operators who have kept Mina chugging along through the noise. Finally, I’d like to thank both Kurt and Evan for their efforts to drive Mina forward over the years. The Mina ecosystem exists thanks to Evan and Izzy, and for that we’ll always be grateful.