Excellent blog post by @MinaProtocol on Bringing the Mina Stack to Life with Zeko. 🤝 Read it here to learn about how Mina and @ZekoLabs are partnering to make modular, zero-knowledge applications more useful and compelling for developers everywhere 👇🧵

[🧵2/7] Mina is the most decentralized blockchain for settling ZKPs—offering secure and cheap ZK verification. ▶️ Zeko, as a ZK Rollup on Mina, complements this by accelerating transaction throughput and application UX with a built-in composable execution environment. Together, they will deliver scalable performance on top of Mina’s underlying security guarantees.

[🧵3/7] By separating verification from execution, the Mina stack delivers both the security of a decentralized blockchain and the performance modern applications demand with unlimited size off-chain execution, and succinct on-chain proof verification. ▶️ The addition of Zeko to the Mina stack delivers a huge win for zkApp developers by enabling instant sequencing of transactions that result in 100x faster slot times than Mina today, and 50x faster slot times post the Mesa Upgrade.

[🧵4/7] Mina Protocol maintains its constant 22KB size through recursive zero knowledge proofs. This makes Mina one of the most accessible and decentralized protocols in Web3—the ideal settlement layer for applications. ▶️ Zeko extends this foundation as a fully isomorphic ZK Rollup framework. This means applications written for Mina run identically on Zeko, but with improved throughput, responsiveness, and other developer experience enhancements. The Zeko L2 shared sequencer collects transactions, applies them to the current state, and groups them into batches for efficient settlement on the Mina L1. Applications or enterprises can also deploy their own custom rollup infrastructure using Zeko, with different privacy, execution, or permissions parameters.

[🧵5/7] Zeko functions as a complete rollup stack - developers can deploy their own app-specific L3s (zkAppChains) that inherit Zeko's sequencing and proving infrastructure. These zkAppChains can be optimized for specific use cases - a private DeFi chain, a gaming chain with custom parameters, cross-chain global proof settlement, an AI verification chain - all ultimately settling back to Mina L1 through the same recursive proof compression. 🤯 This means developers aren't just building zkApps - they're building entire zkApp ecosystems. Each with its own performance characteristics, governance, and fee models, but all secured by the same Mina settlement layer. The result: fast, scalable, cross-chain zkApps with great UX on Zeko, secured and settled by Mina, with the flexibility to spawn specialized chains as applications grow.

[🧵6/7] Which Layer is Right for Your zkApp? ▶️ Start with Mina L1 when: Mina L1 is battle-tested infrastructure. It's the natural choice for settlement-only applications that primarily verify proofs from other systems or act as bridges to other chains. L1 also suits low-frequency, high-value operations like governance decisions, protocol parameters, or treasury management where longer block times are acceptable. ▶️ Scale with Zeko when: Zeko becomes essential when building any user-facing application expecting regular interactions, whether DeFi protocols, gaming platforms, or identity systems. It's designed for applications that need to instantly settle transactions and sync the latest state across multiple users and chains, and for custom rollup implementations that benefit from the shared Zeko infrastructure. The batched proof settlement dramatically reduces per-transaction fees while maintaining Mina's security guarantees, making it the economical choice for growing applications.

[🧵7/7] When applications move to production on Zeko, they gain access to: ▶️ Sub-second sequencer transaction confirmation for responsive user experiences ▶️ Batched settlement to Mina L1, maintaining security while minimizing costs; faster finalization to Mina will be enabled by Mina’s upcoming Mesa Upgrade ▶️ Unlimited account updates with native recursion support, allowing complex computations to compress into constant-size proofs via o1js with unlimited account updates