Mina MINA / Mina

What Is Mina Protocol?

Mina Protocol is a minimal “succinct blockchain” built to curtail computational requirements in order to run DApps more efficiently. Mina has been described as the world’s lightest blockchain since its size is designed to remain constant despite growth in usage. Furthermore, it remains balanced in terms of security and decentralization. The project was rebranded from Coda Protocol to Mina in October 2020.

To learn more about this project, check out our deep dive of Mina Protocol.

The Mina network has a size of only 22 KB, which is miniscule when compared to Bitcoin’s 300 GB blockchain.

What Is Mina Protocol’s Main Objective?

Mina is working on achieving an efficient distributed payment system that enables users to natively verify the platform right from the genesis block. Its technical whitepaper calls this a “succinct blockchain.”

The protocol uses Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Arguments of Knowledge (zk-SNARKs), a cryptographic proof that enables someone to authenticate information without revealing said information. However, enabling a user to trace the platform back to its genesis block can be impractical in a large network. As such, Mina incrementally computes SNARKS that concentrate only on the last few blocks — meaning that end-users check that zk-SNARK-compressed proof, instead of a block’s entire transaction history.

At the heart of Mina protocol is MINA, its native currency, which functions as a utility coin and medium of exchange.

How Does Mina Protocol Function?

Mina is similar to Bitcoin, apart from how it handles transactions, but also employs the account model used in Ethereum.

In this respect, the difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum is that the state of the Bitcoin blockchain contains a list of unspent coins, while Ethereum’s state is made up of account balances.

Mina, on the other hand, uses a prover (or snarker, if you will), an equivalent of a miner, to ensure each block commits to the state.

Mina employs the Ouroboros Samasika, a type of PoS mechanism specially designed for succinct decentralized networks since it provides bootstrapping from a genesis block.

Succinct blockchains contain two major functions: verify and update. Verification touches on consensus, blockchain summary and blocks, while the update function interacts with consensus and chain summary.

Apart from the above implementations, the project uses a parallel scan state to optimize transaction processing speed, which works by grouping unproven blocks and assigning the process to parallel provers.