Mina’s Mesa Upgrade Enters Active Testing With Launch of New Testnet

Mina’s engineering team has initiated the next phase of the Mesa Upgrade, marking the official start of the hard fork process. With the Mesa Testnet now live, development has shifted from planning to hands-on testing, opening participation to developers, node operators, and community members. The testnet is intentionally unstable to identify bugs early and validate improvements such as reduced slot time and expanded account-update limits.The upgrade introduces protocol-level enhancements aimed at increasing network capacity, optimizing performance, and improving flexibility for zkApp builders. A multi-phase roadmap guides progress toward the final hard fork, with checkpoints including the stake snapshot for voting in Nov, the On-Chain Vote in Dec, the Mesa Trail Go/No-Go review, code freeze, the DevNet Go/No-Go assessment, and the mainnet Go/No-Go decision. Updated timing will be shared as testing advances.Community governance plays a central role in the process, with an on-chain vote scheduled for Dec 8-15 for eligible participants to approve proposed changes. As testing continues, o1Labs plans to provide transparent updates, encouraging ongoing experimentation on the Mesa Testnet to support a secure and reliable upgrade to mainnet.