Over the last few days, you may have seen some curious posts from the Mina Protocol account: Maybe you saw me pulling a rabbit out of a hat on stage, or interviews with Alan Turing and dev meetups with Iron Man. 😅 These were clearly fake, and it was to make a point. They’re part of something we’re exploring at @o1_labs . Here’s the why: AI makes it harder every day to know what’s real. If even little team animations can be faked this easily, what about elections, journalism, or your personal memories? Generative AI is unlocking incredible creativity and efficiency (and trust me I’m a heavy user of Claude code), but it also makes it harder to know what’s authentic and what’s fake. In a world where voices, faces, and even entire events can be fabricated, cryptographic proof of what’s real will become essential. Mina, and the zero knowledge technology it utilizes, is uniquely suited to help. Our work has always been about bringing cryptographic truth to applications and the internet at large. The rise of deepfakes provides a timely, tangible proof point for what Mina might do: offer a lightweight, decentralized way to prove authenticity without compromising privacy. Showing these images isn’t about us building a “deepfake detector” product. It’s about sparking the conversation: * What happens when we can no longer trust what we see online? * How can programmable cryptography and zero knowledge proofs help us rebuild that trust? * What does verifiability look like in the AI era? Exploring authenticity is one way we’re putting Mina’s potential on display, but it’s not the only way. We will be channeling our energy into experiments that can show Mina’s real-world value, while continuing to improve the core pillars that make the protocol strong and unlock more value for users. That means: - Supporting ecosystem projects like Zeko, Silvana, Nori, Protokit, and others bringing users into Mina - Driving forward core protocol work, including the upcoming Mesa Upgrade - Delivering progress on the Rust node and the Web node, which will make Mina more accessible - Shipping community-requested features like native proving and automated stake delegation payouts - Creating a demo that showcases Mina’s potential in the authenticity use case, and additional demos or further investment into authenticity, depending on feedback and feasibility Our north star remains the same: we envision an internet where developers use programmable cryptography to create more powerful applications. The rapid evolution of AI only makes that vision more urgent. So yes, our posts were fake. But the problem is very real. The future of the internet won’t just be about what’s possible, it’ll be about what’s provable. And @MinaProtocol is here to make that future real.