This post is based on a conversation between Brian Mokoro and Aryan Bhasin as part of the show web3 for gen z.
Brian is the Head of Finance at Mina Foundation, the company supporting the world’s lightest blockchain, Mina Protocol. We talk about zero-knowledge technology, how protocols like email and Mina create “superhighways” of value for the Internet, and what the role of finance in web3 looks like.
Just as a reminder, Brian is not giving financial, legal, investment, or tax advice. Please do your own research.
Could you start by giving a brief overview of your working experience since graduating from college?
Yeah, I'd love to. I've definitely had a long and extensive career that's ranged across areas of finance in many ways and different modalities as well. And it really started with graduating at Duke. I was an economics major there and I graduated into the great recession, which tends to give everyone a little bit more perspective. Immediately after school I decided to join Teach for America and spent two years as a math teacher in DC. It was a great experience and I really enjoyed my time. All the time I was still thinking about my economics major and how to use that skillset and apply it to my day-to-day work.
I ended up joining the investment banking program at JP Morgan, where I did the classic IB for two years – a lot of M&A and a lot of deals. That too was a great training experience – a really great sort of foundational experience. And following that, I worked on the operations side of private equity. I worked at a large corporate in New York, known as iHeart media, doing corporate M&A and corporate development. I really got to get my hands dirty in some of the more complex capital and balance sheet management aspects of private equity. My work ranged from corporate venture capital deals where we're investing in ad-tech companies to doing acquisitions of hundreds of radio stations across the US. So it was a really diverse experience and all the while that was sort of my introduction to private equity. I solely sort of found my way over to the investment side, working at a firm based in London, doing emerging markets private equity at a firm called Helios. I did that before and after my MBA at Stanford.
That really led me to understand some of the core issues in payments, financial services, and financial access. So when I first came across crypto – around my time at Stanford – it really clicked for me and it piqued my interest. And slowly as I left the private equity field, I looked at the opportunity within crypto to really solve some of the issues that everyday people face. I ended up joining Mina as I found out more about the ZK-proof world and that's where I am now.
There's so much to unpack here. But first, could you elaborate more on your transition from Helios to Mina? Did you first come across the field of crypto while you were working at Helios or was there some other experience that led you into this field?
I think where I first came across crypto was actually when I was at Stanford in the 2016 crypto boom. It was really a hotbed for a lot of the activity in crypto, particularly around the early Ethereum applications being developed on top of a protocol.
A lot of that was happening in the bay area, and that's where I really started to unpack not just crypto as a distributed ledger, but more so crypto’s application and its ability to tackle a multitude of problems. That was when my interest peaked.
And I think over the years between 2016 and 2020, like many folks, I slowly dug deeper into the rabbit hole and started to understand not only some of the applications but some of the toolings and what it looks like to actually build in the space. Around 2020 is when I really started to dive deep during the classic DeFi summer.
That was, I think, the real aha moment for me. Not that DeFi is the end-all-be-all solution – it has its own problems – but that’s when I realized that the nature of blockchain, decentralization, and a user-owned internet really unlocks a lot of potential for applications even beyond the technology.
That totally makes sense. So the onboarding for you was spread out from 2016 to 2020 – any classes that you took at business school related to crypto or was it mostly reading articles and discovering things by yourself?
I think by nature of being at Stanford, I believe we had one of the first – if not the first – blockchain class, and we had a slate of the who's who of crypto project leaders coming in and speaking about their projects. It was a really great time to learn because it was really at the beginning of a lot of the innovation in the Ethereum ecosystem and other L1s. And that was the entry point for me. The rest of the learning, I would say a lot of it was self-led. I'm also lucky to have a number of friends who started a company right out of school in the blockchain space. A couple of others entered directly from business school into the blockchain space. So I've been lucky to have a pretty solid network within web3.
Separate from that, though, the bulk of my learning is self-led. web3’s such a broad space. There's DeFi, there's metaverse, there's NFTs, there's zero knowledge. There are just so many technologies that are being pushed forward. When you learn about a new tool or new technology, you can really get digging into it, whether that’s through research, Twitter, Reddit, or reading white papers. There are a lot of ways to learn, but I definitely think it's one of those spaces where it benefits you to dig a little deeper.
I completely agree. Let’s talk more about the Mina Protocol. Mina is solving the problem of making blockchains more scalable through a technology called zero-knowledge proofs. ZK-proofs can be a confusing concept to most people who are just starting out in the industry, so I want to put out a hypothetical situation.
Let's say you're back to working at Teach for America, but this time you're a crypto teacher. You have to teach a class to middle schoolers on how the Mina protocol and ZK-proofs work. How would you explain these concepts?
That's a great question. The way I think about zero knowledge is really as a technology. It answers the question of How do you share information in a way that doesn't expose sensitive data? and How do you verify that something is true without sharing the sensitive information that you want to keep private?
The cool thing about zero knowledge is that, in many ways, it can be a wrapper around any piece of sensitive information – anything that you want to keep private. You're allowed to basically prove almost beyond a shadow of a doubt that something is true without having to see the actual piece of data.
Now, the way that I would explain it to middle schoolers is through the game of Where’s Waldo? Imagine, as a young kid, just going through a book of Where's Waldo and having to find Waldo. That's actually a very difficult game to play with two players because, when you find Waldo, you have to kind of verify that you've seen it without showing the other person where he is if they're also playing.
So a way of thinking about this is: what if I could prove to you where Waldo was without having to show you where it is on the page? I want to make sure that I keep the secret, but I want you to know that I know where it is. Zero-knowledge allows for that.
Let's take this example a step further. The way that the actual technology works is something like this: if I know where Waldo is, let's say I put up a massive white sheet between you and the actual pages of the book. You can't see anything but the sheet and then I cut a little hole in the sheet. And on the other side, you see a picture of Waldo. Do I know where Waldo is? Based on that example, I just showed you where Waldo is.
Let's say you don't believe me. Let's say you're like, “Okay, you were just guessing and that was lucky”. I say, okay, I'm gonna turn the pages and put up a blank sheet again. You can't see anything – it’s totally opaque. And I cut a little hole and I peek open the hole and you see Waldo. Maybe I’m lucky because I did it twice. Let's say I do that a thousand times. I've shown you a thousand times that I know where Waldo is without showing you where on the page because you can see through the little hole I opened up that I know where Waldo is. And then at the end of it all, I close the book. I come around the white sheet and I just hand it to you. You have no information on where Waldo is, other than that I know where it is.
So how does being able to verify any piece of information scale down the size of a blockchain? How would you link those two concepts?
That’s really a nuance of how zero-knowledge works. There are a couple of flavors of zero knowledge. Mina really focuses on ZK-Snarks, which is really optimized. I think it's one of the most promising technologies for enabling privacy on the internet. There are other flavors. There's another one called ZK-Stark.
Broadly what ZK allows is that it allows both privacy and scalability. The scalability aspect is linked to the idea that rather than having this ledger that has all of the pieces of information, you can have proofs of the information or data. Let’s go back to the Waldo example, just for a second. When I share with you a proof of where Waldo is – a small hole in the paper – it’s much smaller in size than the actual page.
And so, rather than have ledgers of blocks of massive data, what you can instead have are proofs of the state of the data. Particularly in Mina’s example, we're going to be able to enable proofs of a blockchain to make it 22kB in size. And implicit in that is scalability. So when we think about ZK as a scaling solution, it really is an architectural shift in how blockchains are constructed while maintaining the security, privacy, and ultimately the ability to verify all transactions within a blockchain. That's what a blockchain like Mina enables.
When you have a blockchain that's the size of 22 kilobytes, any phone could store the state of a blockchain. And so it's not just scaling the number of nodes that can exist on a network, but also the kinds of nodes, because now you can suddenly have all sorts of zkApps running on your mobile phone that previously wasn't possible.
That's exactly right. One of the issues with these blockchains now is that they are incredibly heavy. If you look at Ethereum, I think a light node for Ethereum is over 500 gigabytes. And if you wanted to have a full node on Ethereum, it would likely be over a terabyte.
Those are data sizes that ultimately phones in the current state are not able to hold. The idea of being able to push a blockchain to the edge necessitates blockchains to be of a size that is manageable on edge computing devices. (I use edge computing devices in terms of both your mobile phone but also IOT.)
Ultimately, the storage size of a blockchain is a limiting factor of the type of computers that can process and act as a node, or hold a node within them. And a beautiful thing about having a 22-kilobyte blockchain like Mina is that it would enable things like edge computing – being able to interact seamlessly with a node on your phone.
The dream of a truly decentralized web3 really requires being able to get to the types of computers that the majority of the world has access to. These aren't massive mining-style rigs in someone's basement. These are phones – whether they're your iPhone or an Android or a smartphone in the hands of someone living in north India or west Africa. Ultimately, when we think about the distributed and decentralized web, we have to be thinking not only about what we’re enabling now, but how we can enable broader access to technology and hardware.
That's interesting. I remember that this kind of decentralization was the vision that Bitcoin started with. But as mining became more and more difficult, hardware became more and more specialized and we went from regular computers to GPUs and entire farms running to mine blocks. Edge computing would open up this whole vision of any kind of device being able to participate in the network.
Yeah, that's exactly right. And it's really exciting to think about what that version of blockchain looks like. It’s this great vision of that original version of the internet – user-owned and decentralized, where users actually control their own data. The version of that to truly exist requires a level of access that I think zero knowledge is uniquely capable of providing. That’s what’s really exciting about zk-proofs. I consider myself a zk-maximalist, and not just because I'm at Mina, but also because, as a core technology, what it enables is a very interesting proposition for technology going forward.
How would you connect Mina protocol to your role as the head of finance?
I think it's interesting because I look at finance in crypto as being something that can be very broad. Obviously, if you're coming from an economics degree or a finance degree, there's everything from crypto investing, crypto trading, working at an application layer, working at an L1 or foundation, like Mina foundation. And then there are a number of different flavors in between that.
Within the world of L1s, and particularly at Mina foundation, the role of finance is interesting, because it’s all stuff you would think of at a startup – think cash management budgeting, payments fundraising, etc. But then it's blockchain. We have a pretty sizeable delegation or staking program. We have a massive token-based treasury that we have to manage. We have a pretty large and growing grants program that is all critical to the Mina ecosystem and the overall success of the protocol. All of that is encompassed within the finance role, so I think there's much more to finance within the blockchain world while also having all of the elements of finance at a startup.
I understand how investment banking or private equity would be helpful to prepare you for the elements of finance at a regular startup.
What experiences would be good to prepare for treasury management, grants programs, and other finance elements specific to crypto?
I would say treasury management and grants programs are two different spaces related to regular finance.
There’s treasury management at corporations. There's treasury management at hedge funds. There's a treasury of management at investment firms and also at L1s and blockchain companies. The fundamental idea is that you have a sizable amount of assets that are relatively liquid or fully liquid, with which you need to design a strategy that optimizes return while minimizing risk.
So, the way to think about that is ultimately the same investment skillset that you would use as a private equity professional or hedge fund professional. But the risk-return profile is different and the assets you're looking at have a much different volatility. In the case of a blockchain or crypto company, some amount of the treasury would likely be in the native token or in another token. Managing that takes a level of foresight and understanding of the overall market trends, the overall industry trends, your specific business needs in terms of cash flow, etc. Maybe my bias is that I've been an investor for most of my career, so when I think of treasury management, I think most of investment management and the management of assets is to achieve the right risk-return profile based on the needs and strategy of your business.
With grants, it's slightly different because one of our roles at Mina foundation is to serve and empower the Mina ecosystem. So, when we think about serving and empowering an ecosystem, that's where grants come squarely into the strategy. Our grants program is pretty broad – we do both retroactive and prospective grants. We have to think about how to map the strategy of what we envision or would love to promote around the protocol to what projects do others in the community want to build. There’s this interesting mapping that happens. We often find a community member already building something we think would be cool for the ecosystem.
That’s why I think this is a really interesting role for someone with an economics background. You’re involved with strategy – essentially matching grants as capital allocated across different projects – and you get a lot of really good exposure to what’s happening within the blockchain space.
It seems like there's a split between these two examples of treasury management and grants programs. Treasury management seems to be tied more to investing: how are you allocating a pool of assets to optimize returns and minimize risk? The second side is grants programs, which seem to be more strategic: how would you allocate a pool of assets to incentivize developers to create something that furthers your strategic goals?
Yeah, I think so. Obviously, this is all from the perspective of somebody who's coming with more of an economics or finance bent. There are other aspects to all of these that are more operational or organizational. But I think there’s something interesting with these two examples, treasury management and managing grants programs, that could be really interesting to someone coming from an economics degree at Princeton or Duke.
We've been talking about different industries from a surface level, specifically banking, private equity, and crypto. You've also had experience with teaching. How would you compare the different work cultures across these four industries, especially between wall street and crypto?
I can focus more on wall street and crypto because I think there's this trope – that at some point was true, but is less and less true – that wall street and crypto are oppositional forces. But, I would argue that these two worlds are converging and ultimately I would say that a lot of the problems crypto is solving are the same problems wall street is trying to solve. These are the same problems that, if you think back to the days of traders in Venice, people were trying to solve by creating an intermediary that provides value and solves real financial or value-based problems. Both crypto and wall street do that, just in vastly different ways. Obviously, crypto’s solutions are designed around blockchain technologies and decentralization – mostly public ledgers, at least in the case of a protocol like Mina. But, if you take things at the most abstract level, what these systems are doing is actually pretty similar.
If you look to the culture and ask, “what's the culture of wall street versus the culture of crypto,” once you realize that blockchain and all these L1s are technologies, you realize crypto companies are essentially like tech startups. So, it's the difference between wall street and startups, which is a distinction that most people are acutely aware of. They're just vastly different in terms of what your day-to-day looks like. They're massive institutions versus 30-person foundations that are 50% developers. These are just massively different organizations.
Do you feel that crypto might be portrayed the same way wall street and big tech has been recently, just by the nature of companies growing in size, or do you feel that decentralization as a technology itself will prevent that kind of villainization from happening?
My real answer is, I don't know. If I was going to say, “what does decentralization solve with respect to the things that are generally problematic in society?” I could speak to that. I think that the internet provided access, but then it felt like the value was not spread evenly across users, builders, owners, and investors. That dynamic, frankly, has existed throughout investing or venture capitalist investing. There's always a split of how value gets distributed across the users, the workers, the owner, and the investors. So, it's less around this idea of villainization or things getting big, it's just around how is value distributed across all the stakeholders who participate in an ecosystem.
In the case of blockchain and true web3 companies, a lot of the design in tokens, governance, voting power, and participation is designed towards trying to address the problem of how does value get distributed and who gets to own the web. So when we say decentralized, it's not just the nodes we’re talking about – it's the value and ownership and the way that we participate. I think what we're offering is not necessarily this fight against villainization. It's a really high promising solution to the problem of value distribution. It may not be perfect, but by a design, it's a really interesting idea.
Specifically, I think that what we're doing at Mina is a really interesting take on how to solve this fundamental issue of the privacy element and the scaling element of blockchain. Now, I wasn't around in web1 – I was a kid – but fundamentally, web1 was very hard to interact with and it was clunky and there wasn't a lot of tooling. But it had a lot of promise. The design of email ultimately proved to be one of the greatest innovations out of web1. Email, HTTPS, and a few other protocols that you don't see that kind of exist in the back of everyday software we use, they’re ultimately just computers speaking to each other along a certain protocol or certain super highway.
The idea of these super highways that exist in the background that allow for some value transfer was really great in web1, but ultimately not very well monetized. And again, I'm not using “value” in a financial way. When I need to send a message from New York to my friend who's in San Francisco, I could do mail, or I could do email, and email obviously provides me a lot more value in terms of how quickly and how effectively I can get a message across. That idea around web1 wasn’t very well monetized. And now, we have these new technologies and protocols like Mina, where fundamentally there is a super highway that allows for private data transactions – a private verification of some state of true or false. That, as a tool interspersed across the broader internet, is a very powerful protocol or super highway to have amidst all of these other technologies that exist out there.
So, the super highway you're talking about for Mina is this notion of value that goes beyond financial value and just the value of being able to verify certain pieces of information?
Exactly. It opens up different ways of interacting electronically. I'm talking about the transfer of the verification of some piece of information. Let’s take this discussion outside computers for a second. Let's say you’re renting an apartment in New York. First of all, it’s a crap shoot. It’s a whole process. You have to see a bunch of apartments. Maybe you love one, maybe you don't. If you apply to it, you have to get all of this paperwork, your bank statement, your credit score, etc. together. You pull everything from your files and you give it over to a broker who you just met the day before. And they say, “thank you, we'll call you”.
It's a crap experience. And it's also a very risky experience embedded in sharing sensitive information. What a broker or a landlord is just trying to do is verify that you're going to pay and they have different pieces of data that they're looking for that basically sum up and say, “yeah, you're creditworthy. I'm willing to sign a lease with you” or “no, you're not.”
Zero-knowledge enables a way to verify that your credit score is above 650, or that you make over 50K a year, or that you graduated from Princeton. All of these items are ultimately just a true or false statement that someone's trying to verify. That is what zero-knowledge provides.
So the way we interact is the same - the way I would be looking for apartments in New York would still be the same – but the protocol that's being used for verification inside is going to be different. That's the value add or super highway that Mina protocol is creating.
Correct. I think that's the unlock for a lot of blockchain and crypto. There are some subsets of blockchain that are very much UI-based, like NFTs and metaverse things that you're interacting with or seeing with your eyes.
But then there are also a lot of blockchains that are just rules around how computers interact and it’s openly verifiable because most of it is open source and distributed so that no one person or node can change the rules without permission. These computers interact with no one really having to say, “Hey, do this through that.” A lot of it is done through a smart contract that has specific rules.
So, I think that the real unlock for me as I was learning about crypto was less like trying to feel it and touch it, but more about understanding how this is changing the way that certain interactions happen today. In the case of a zero-knowledge proof, it was about understanding how this changes the way that information is shared or verified.
The way that it impacts you is that perhaps just getting an apartment in New York requires fewer steps now because there's a zero knowledge-based application that uses open-source smart contracts to verify your credit information on your phone. It makes your life a lot easier because you don't have to pull all this information to get an apartment. You're not worried about 13 different brokers in New York having your information sitting on a laptop that's five years old that they might leave in a cafeteria. These are the things that you need to look at to understand certain parts of crypto. Particularly with something like zero knowledge, that ultimately is the value that the technology provides.
I'm honestly sad that you are still not teaching because you'd be doing a really good job with explaining crypto. Let’s tie in a specific element of financing we talked about earlier: tokens. We talked about how they're changing the landscape from web2 to web3.
From a company's perspective, though, how have tokens changed corporate finance, whether that’s M&A deals, venture fundraising, etc? How are token deals structured?
I can talk more from the perspective of how tokens affect the deal environment. Whether it's VC or a hedge fund or private equity, you're still making an investment. Ultimately you're deploying that capital and you're purchasing either the rights to, or the actual assets of, various items in a company. It could be that I buy a debt instrument, where I put money in and then I'm owed interest on it. Or I could buy preferred equity, which is just equity with a little bit less risk and a little bit more preferences. These are all just different instruments that have been applied to how you can invest in an asset or in a company.
Tokens are just another instrument that's been added to the pool of items that you can work with. It is a relatively new instrument, but ultimately it's an instrument that has its own economics, defined as tokenomics. The way you think about it might be slightly different than the toolset you use to look at a bond, but ultimately you're thinking about, “Okay, what does this instrument do? Is that valuable to me? And is it valuable in the context of this overall deal?”
How do tokens play out as an instrument? And what's the value that an investor is capturing when they're buying tokens as part of a deal?
It's really hard to explain tokenomics in general, because it’s based on the underlying ecosystem. If you ask me, “what’s the value of this piece of preferred equity?”, I would ask you, “what's the deal? What's the company? What are they selling? What do they make? Are they operational? Are they cash flow positive? Do they have customers?” So it's a little nebulous question because the value is underlying whatever the tokenomics is.
I think that from the perspective of a lot of the early VCs who looked at the space, there's this idea of participation in the ecosystem and the opportunity to create a broader ecosystem that has value accruing to some portion of the participants in that ecosystem. When an investor invests in a cap table that includes tokens, they’re ultimately choosing to participate in its ecosystem because they think the ecosystem will generate value. The idea is that if it generates enough value, the value should accrue to the users, and the investor is a participant and user in the ecosystem. Does that make sense?
Yes, totally. So when you're buying tokens, you're buying a chunk of that ecosystem and growing the ecosystem together, because the tokens accrue value towards users, which includes you.
The idea of tokens being this way to participate in the ecosystem is important to emphasize. These technologies ultimately have a lot of promise, but they're relatively new and the second and third-order things that are built off of these L1s will be even more exciting than the L1s are. And so, participating in the design of what a protocol will look like is – particularly for a technologist – a very interesting prospect.
That makes sense. I'd like to pivot the conversation to your advice for Gen Z’ers interested in web3. I want to split it up into two questions. For the first part, do you have any advice for Gen Z finance or economics majors, or high schoolers or young professionals that are interested in web3 from a finance perspective?
Yes, I do. You have a long career. Spend some of it doing stuff that you don't really love doing, but do it anyway because you'll get really good at that and whatever skill you're learning will just be really useful for the rest of your life. And then spend some of your career trying to cover whatever needs that you have, whether it's basic needs, your family needs, etc. Finally, spend some of your career just doing something you absolutely love. Do something that gets you excited. That mix can be whatever mix you want – whether it's sequential or a mixed bag along the way.
Coming from economics at a school like Princeton or Duke, we’re exposed by nature to what the folks did 5, 10, or 20 years before us. But, we don't really get exposure to what the world will be looking like 5, 10, or 20 years from now. And so, if you design your career around getting good skills, making sure you cover your basic needs and then making sure that you love what you do getting up every day, then chances are wherever you are in 5, 10, 20 years, you'll be pretty happy doing what you're doing. That can be any size industry, any size company, any sort of stage, and in any sort of role. But if you do that, I think you'll get it right.
The second piece of my question is on business school versus self-learning. The web3 industry has always leaned away from conventional paths, like two years of investment banking, or two years of consulting, and generally favored self-learning.
For anyone considering a business school or graduate school, what would be your advice toward self-learning versus going to one of these structured paths?
My advice is that you should be self-learning now, regardless of what you're doing. If you're interested, there is so much more material to dive into on the web3 space than there was even two years ago. And way more than when I first came around the space at Stanford. Now, you almost have to structure how you’re taking in this plethora of information.
Self-learning is one of those things where, if you make it a passion, regardless of your career, you're going to do really great. Knowledge is a very valuable thing to have. Particularly knowledge as it compounds on itself. After spending five years following the industry, you have a sense of how things have changed: you've seen a couple of cycles, and you understand a little bit more about who the players are, what projects have been successful, and why they've been successful. Add another five years to that, and you're an industry expert.
I don't think the idea of business school is vastly different than self-learning, at least by design. In my experience, it was self-learning with other people who were interested in learning the same thing I wanted to. There was a lot more community building. And, as I mentioned earlier in the show, a lot of the people I met at Stanford gave me my first exposure to web3 as an industry – not web3 as a concept or a token that I bought on Coinbase. Several years later, a lot of the people that are within my network in web3 are more of my classmates who are now fairly into the industry.
Business school is almost like this accelerator where you're all accelerating your community together. If you think about blockchain and crypto broadly as these communities of actors that operate together in a decentralized way, having more nodes within that community is supremely valuable. That’s where business school adds value.
You've probably experienced this at Princeton, where you have people who you spent time with in the library late at night, but also spent time at a bar, and now they're your really good friend and they're going to X industry. Then in two years, you're going to have a question about that industry and you'll call 'em up. It's the same idea. I think that from the perspective of self-learning, business school is a really great way to coordinate self-learning for a lot of really incredible and passionate people.
That's a great analogy between blockchain and business school. Any last thoughts or ways that people can get in touch with you?
Definitely look up what we're doing up Mina. Check out minaprotocol.com, it has a bunch of information about the cool things that are happening with the project. I think that generally, I would encourage people to read about zero knowledge and understand what it means as a technology and what its potential applications are. If you're a technologist, it's a super exciting space to be looking at.
And then I think it's important to remember to broadly think about this space. These are a series of technologies that have compounded them upon themselves to enable a new iteration of technologies, one of them being distributed ledgers and another being smart contracts. The next iteration seems to be around technologies like NFTs and DAOs.
There’s so much to dig into, and I would just encourage people to pick an aspect of crypto that they’re interested in and learn a lot about it. We say web3 and we group a bunch of things that are happening all at once, but if you peel back the onion, you really start to understand how cool this space is and how many different, interesting new toolings are actually blooming at the moment.