Projects I’m watching going into Q4. Not because they’re guaranteed winners but because September gave each of them something worth investigating. 💰🪙📈

Q3 and September With @Minima_Global September was a busy month for Minima, but not in the usual one big announcement way. A lot of the work was happening underneath the surface: I>> INTEGRITAS started looking more like a product. In Minima’s September quarterly update, the company said Integritas was tracking towards $10K in monthly recurring revenue, with potential applications expanding into industrial IoT, asset tracking, EV infrastructure, document governance, connected devices and autonomous systems. II>> MINIMA-ON-CHIP entered its next chapter. Phase 3 with Arm, Siemens and the University of Southampton was confirmed for September. The target is now demonstrating the design, tape-out and physical prototypes. The interest is now on what happens when the software leaves the development environment and meets actual silicon. III>> EDGE STUDIO also became part of the bigger picture. The September Q3 update formally introduced the Raspberry Pi-based Edge Studio beta (a workbench for developers experimenting with connected-device data, verification and potential monetisation). It gives the “edge” idea something people can actually build with. IV>> Then, MAXIMIZE ended. More than 50 million $MINIMA had been distributed over the lifetime of the programme. The remaining allocation was exhausted, so new Maximize contracts can no longer be created. Existing contracts continue according to their terms. One of Minima's longest-running chapters closed. The September developer work was where things got particularly interesting. The latest dev call demonstrated Parlons, PandaPools and other applications, alongside a reworked MDS hub. They're increasingly useful as tests of what developers can actually build with the stack. V>> Minima C++ : Still in internal testing, but the purpose is important: getting closer to the hardware and unlocking more of the chip's potential. The story lies in what happens when the implementation has to take hardware constraints seriously. VII>> Minima Core also kept moving. The team reported significant RAM improvements, particularly relevant to MegaMMR nodes. As memory requirements determine what hardware can realistically run software, this optimisation brings about good possibilities. VIII>> There was also progress on KeyUses. A potential fix using the block number as a counter was demonstrated and put into testing ahead of a wider release. September also brought another architectural idea: Applications don't necessarily have to live inside the traditional MiniDapp model. The team has been exploring native applications and services, including Android APKs and Windows services, communicating with Minima through operating-system mechanisms. IX>> There was also an important piece of transparency. Minima disclosed a security incident affecting its Web Wallet infrastructure. The company said the incident occurred in May, affected some users who logged in between March 20 and May 8, and did not compromise the Minima blockchain itself. The affected infrastructure was replaced and the company outlined its response in the September quarterly update. September and Q3 weren't characterised by slogans of why blockchain belongs on phones. It was a transition of making the machinery underneath those ideas more real. Products, revenue, hardware, applications, memory, cryptography, developer tooling, and a few things that simply had to be fixed

Work continues tomorrow, September 1, for the Minima team as they head back to the University of Southampton to continue the next phase of chip development by putting Minima onto real silicon rather than an FPGA. This will mark the distinction between getting the blockchain to run on a chip design and getting it to run on an actual chip. Though FPGA as a programmable hardware is useful for testing and validating hardware designs (because engineers can change the logic without manufacturing a new chip), it isn’t the finished product. Moving to silicon opens the blockchain to how the actual chip will behave under real operating conditions. In terms of timing, power consumption, heat, reliability, throughput and how efficiently the hardware actually performs the work it was designed to accelerate. These are difficult things to accurately measure until this phase is complete and for Minima, one of the interesting parts of this work is cryptography. Previous development has explored hardware acceleration for SHA3, as one of the cryptographic primitives used by the protocol. Putting that logic into silicon creates the opportunity to examine what dedicated hardware can actually deliver. Because Minima was designed around the premise that a blockchain node shouldn't necessarily require a server or a warehouse of machines. The long-term question is whether blockchain infrastructure can become small, efficient and inexpensive enough to live much closer to the edge and that could mean very different things depending on the hardware, especially devices that already have processors but aren't traditionally thought of as blockchain infrastructure. The chip work is ultimately going to explore that boundary. There has already been a useful step in that direction. The Southampton project involved porting Minima from Java to C++, deploying it on Arm based cores and experimenting with custom hardware acceleration. Now it's going to be more tangible by moving to silicon. So, tomorrow marks the beginning of another engineering cycle. Take what has been tested in programmable hardware and move it into manufactured silicon, measure what happens, make improvements and iterate. When successful, the outcome won't simply be “Minima has a chip.” It will be the answers that come from putting the protocol onto dedicated hardware: How small can the node become? How little power can it use? How much computation can be moved into hardware? And where does that make economic sense? The Southampton work is one step toward finding out.

REMINDER: The Pi Edge Studio is ready for testers. Minima is taking Integritas closer to the edge with a Raspberry Pi Workbench built for realworld testing. We need everyone willing to test, experiment and share feedback minima.zite.so

I* Most blockchain clients move in one direction with more features, services and background processes whereas Minima is doing the opposite by stripping stuff away At the centre of this network is Minima Core—the lightweight software responsible for running the blockchain itself