The Mina Foundation, the public benefit corporation serving the Mina Protocol, announces the addition of Harvard Business School (HBS) Finance Professor to its board. Di Maggio is the Director of the Fintech, Crypto and Web3 Lab at Harvard University which supports students in exploring and studying Web3 technologies. He is also a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Coinbase Institute Advisory board member.
Other current board members include Former Executive Director at Zcash Foundation Josh Cincinnati, Crypto Engineering Lead at Twitter Tess Rinearson, CEO of Mina Foundation Evan Shapiro, and General Counsel of Mina Foundation Joon Kim.
Marco Di Maggio shared, “I’m honored to be joining the Mina Foundation board and excited to bring my interests in how blockchain technology and digital assets can improve financial inclusion, contributing to Mina’s broader goal of fostering the user-owned decentralized web.”
CEO of Mina Foundation and Co-Founder of the Mina Protocol Evan Shapiro expressed, “The addition of Marco Di Maggio to the Mina Foundation board shows that our approach to prioritizing a web powered by participants continues to attract leading experts like Di Maggio from top institutions. We look forward to seeing Di Maggio’s contributions to the greater Mina Ecosystem.”
At HBS, Professor Di Maggio’s research focuses on how new technologies have disrupted financial markets and its effects on firms and individuals. His work has been published in leading academic peer-reviewed journals such as the American Economic Review, Journal of Finance, Management Science and has been widely cited by outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Bloomberg, Institutional Investor, Slate, and Forbes. In 2016, Poets and Quants named him to its list of the Best 40 Under 40 Business School Professors.
Di Maggio added, “I’m particularly interested in how Mina deploys applications of Zero Knowledge to enable programmable privacy and scalability across the network, and I look forward to working alongside the other Mina Foundation board members to continue encouraging developer interest in utilizing Mina’s tooling to bring the user-powered web to life.”
About Mina Protocol
Mina is the world’s lightest blockchain, powered by participants. Rather than apply brute computing force, Mina uses advanced cryptography and recursive zk-SNARKs to design an entire blockchain that is about 22kb, the size of a couple of tweets. It is the first layer-1 to enable efficient implementation and easy programmability of zero knowledge smart contracts (zkApps). With its unique privacy features and ability to connect to any website, Mina is building a private gateway between the real world and crypto—and the secure, democratic future we all deserve.
