One shot, one prompt to build a working neobank in 30 minutes. Install a skill from the Polygon docs, prompt your favorite LLM with "build me a neobank", and get a complete solution wired to the Open Money Stack API. Here's a full build, start to finish.

Polygon Open Money Stack is now in technical preview. A first look at how your business can move money with stablecoins in one easy platform 🧵

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink tells the World Economic Forum the world must move faster toward digitized currencies under a single unified blockchain to “reduce corruption.” He outlines a vision where every asset is placed on one system, including stocks, bonds, real estate, money market funds, and cash. In that system, ownership would be tokenized, fractionalized, programmable, and instantly transferable on one all-encompassing blockchain ledger.

BREAKING: Polygon to become U.S. regulated payments platform We’re acquiring Coinme and Sequence to move all money onchain. → Regulated money movement in 48 states → Fiat on/off ramps → 50,000 fiat-to-crypto locations in the U.S. → Easy onboarding with wallet infra → 1-click crypto transactions across chains All vertically integrated in the Polygon Open Money Stack.

I found spoken English to be very ineffective in propagation through Singapore’s humid air. Often, I have to shout, bordering on sounding rude. Thai and Vietnamese evolved to be higher pitched to propagate efficiently through the humid air in Southeast Asia.

It's interesting to see the OP Stack and Arbitrum Orbit Stack diverge further and further. When they started, both teams were building a type-1 EVM rollup, but today their direction's are quite different. The OP vision: a cluster of chains, with shared standards (Ethereum DA, Ethereum gas token, shared governance, shared fault proof), that all interoperate and act as the "unified superchain". The Arbitrum vision: use the technology and go crazy with customization. Stylus, custom gas token, alt-DA or DACs. OP and Arbitrum today are probably less competitive than when they started off because their product benefits are so distinct. FWIW I also see zkVMs and prover networks going this way. Today, we're all building RISC-V zkVMs and prover networks that compete on being cheap/fast. But in the longer-term, feature sets will become richer and divergent, making them non-commodities.

Its very cool to be part of the Mina Web Node testing group... This can be a gamer changer for @MinaProtocol webnode.minaprotocol.com/lea… Not produced a block yet, but its in the diary!

From smoother hard forks to protocol performance and features improvements to application-layer redesigns, o1Labs is hard at work on Mina Protocol -- let's do a deep dive into what we've been busy building We published our team roadmaps late last year, I'll go deep into what we've been building against those in this post. 👨‍💻 You'll start seeing the results in our upcoming release, but we're also working on some larger projects to address some of the long-standing concerns. Everything we do is open-source. Like everything should be in crypto. No bullshit allowed. You can go deep into anything by following our GitHub activity github.com/o1-labs and talking to us on Discord. Now let's go deep into what all our engineering teams have been doing. Hard fork mechanism We heard from everyone involved with the last hardfork: The process was not smooth, and such a complex upgrade process made it hard to have confidence in the success of the upgrade. Our node operators team is hard at work designing a new upgrade mechanism that will be far more automatic, far smoother, and that will make it easy to ship important updates quickly. As the team comes close to a final design, we will involve the community and seek rounds of feedback to make the process is buttery smooth as we build it out. This is an important step in releasing the other changes we're working on. Slot time At o1Labs, we're currently running an internal testnet to measure performance and identify bottlenecks. We wish it was as simple as just changing the number, but so many things depend on it that we're working hard to make sure everything works the same! We've identified the biggest bottleneck in proving time: Sometimes we pause during block production to store node state on disk, so that we can recover quickly if the node crashes or is restarted. The performance team is addressing this issue now; even before the upgrade, this should mean that nodes become more responsive and more efficient! We've also identified some speed-up potential in our hashing and handling of transaction logic. As we improve these parts, we should see the potential slot time move even lower. As we see successful tests with the slot time on our internal network, we'll be opening up access so that you can connect and verify it yourself. For many zkApps, this will also begin to address throughput issues, making real-world throughput finally achievable. Node memory usage Another common issue is the RAM usage of the Mina node, causing high hardware requirements. High hardware requirements = high node operator costs! We hear node operators that this needs to improve: That time is now. A large component of RAM usage is storing proofs in memory. For Mina, we don't just store the tiny block proof: We also have all the transaction proofs along the way, which can be quite large. Our first step is to write these to an on-disk database, only holding in memory what we really need. This has large knock-on consequences too: for years we've wanted to include more transactions in each block, but 128 per block has already driven RAM usage uncomfortably high. With these fixes, we will be able to experiment with higher transaction throughput in each block, in addition to the new higher block rate that we're targeting with other fixes. Higher transaction throughput Caching proofs to the database already lets us go a long way, but we know we can go further. Snark work for large zkApp transactions can be slow, which limits how many we can support in a block. But it's already obvious how to split them up: we can prove the account updates separately, and our snark work becomes smaller and more consistently sized. Treating each account update as a small transaction could decrease throughput though: we don't want a zkApp transaction with 5 updates to use up 5/128 spaces in the block. Instead, we're queuing up this work after the RAM and block capacity improvements, so that transactions really will be more plentiful. There's more to do on the crypto side too: Currently we pair up transactions in a "binary tree", which means that every extra layer of snark work doubles our throughput. We know that pickles can support more than 2 proofs though, so we will be experimenting with 3+ proofs in the scan-state merges. 2^7 = 128 is where we are today, but 3^7 = 2187 for the same delay of snark work. And we know this will be helpful for o1js developers too! As we enable recursion with more proofs, the o1js API will be updated to make it available to all zkApps, in a backwards-compatible way. Finality The block time improvements will already help with Mina's slow finality, inherited from Ouroboros, but we know that we can do better. As part of a shared project between Mina and Project Untitled, we're targeting a hybrid consensus model, which we're hopeful can bring us to <10 block confirmations before transactions are confirmed to be truly final. Some details of this already exist in the [Project Untitled] whitepaper draft github.com/o1-labs/project-u… , but we'll be sharing more on the design as we're ready to start building. zkApp programmability in o1js At MinaCon last November, we demoed the new v2 API for o1js. This exposes much more of the protocol's design for zkApp developers, letting them better use the features from the protocol in the ways they were intended. This new API has layered abstractions, so you can see how everything works, and choose the right level of abstraction for your apps. An alpha version of this API will be included in the upcoming release, and we're going to keep iterating on it as we get your feedback and bug reports. Protocol feature development As zkApp development using o1js continues, we've been seeing a few recurring pain points. The biggest of these is access to the protocol's state: we're working to add "historical" preconditions for protocol state, so that applications can use Mina's randomness, ledger hashes, and all the other goodness, even when the zkApp proofs take some time and the chain has moved forward. We've also been hearing some feedback on the zkApp upgrade mechanism, and we hear the concerns. One of our upcoming focuses will be finalizing the zkApp protocol API, so that we can be confident in supporting it for every future upgrade, and turning off the signature fallback. We also have a design for the zkPromise API and protocol feature-set, which makes it easier to reason about asynchronous computations that zkApps often encounter. The design for this is already fairly mature, stay tuned for more details! And we'll be working to integrate it with the finalized zkApp protocol API, to make sure everything works together beautifully. All of these pieces will require hard-forks to deliver, so these directly benefit from our work on the upgrade mechanism. Folding Another way that we can speed up transaction throughput and allow for more powerful zkApps is folding. The team is making strong progress on Arrabbiata github.com/o1-labs/proof-sys…, which will make folding available for the protocol, for o1js developers, and lets us supercharge the performance of o1vm. Project Untitled Finally, we are dedicating time and resources to Project Untitled, most recently releasing our whitepaper draft github.com/o1-labs/project-u…. We know that zkApps today have a state management problem, and we think that this is an important part of the puzzle to solve. With Project Untitled and Mina together, more complex, more dynamic zkApps will become easier to build, and some previously-impossible zkApps start looking very achievable. Project Untitled has many other synergies with other web3 projects which we are exploring now and expect will help the Mina ecosystem become more integrated with Ethereum and other ecosystems. We're working on a demo of the cryptography as a precursor to our first testnet, which we hope can give zkApp developers the ability to design these new applications while we work on the protocol. And much more All these things are happening now or soon, but we're also committed to fixing small issues and bugs that come up, and addressing feature request. We'll continue to call the most important of these out in release notes, and you can watch us fixing them in realtime on GitHub if you're so inclined! For the rest of our plans for Mina and Project Untitled in 2025, you can see our team's roadmaps xitter.cf/bkase_/status/18827920… , our draft Project Untitled whitepaper, or engage with our engineers on discord. Again, everything we do is open-source. No bullshit. If you have questions, ask us. And you can follow our development live at github.com/o1-labs