Last week, I got asked quite a few times what inspired Miden's design. The answer is that there wasn't a single source of inspiration but rather me trying to combine best parts (IMO) of projects I really liked/used/worked on. To name a few: - Bitcoin: Miden notes with programmable scripts are modeled directly after Bitcoin's UTXOs. We've even borrowed some naming conventions (e.g., Bitcoin has P2SH, P2PKH etc. scripts and we have P2ID, P2IDE scripts). - Ethereum: in addition to notes, Miden also has accounts which are very similar to Ethereum's smart contracts - i.e., accounts have code, storage, nonces, and store assets. - Zcash: to make note consumption untraceable, we use the concept of nullifiers which are heavily inspired by Zcash's design (though how we define and store nullifiers in Miden works a bit differently). - Sui: Miden's asset model is inspired by Sui's object model, and with some changes we are working on now, the two will be even more similar. - NEAR/Solana: the use of Rust as the smart contract programming language was inspired by NEAR and to a lesser extent by Solana.