Evan Shapiro and Izaak Meckler brought the Mina Protocol (of which the Mina coin is the native crypto) to life in mid-2017. The two cryptography experts wanted to solve the blockchain trilemma, and built Mina as a lightweight solution that could facilitate scalability, security, and decentralization. Blockchain producers are responsible for selecting which transactions to include in the next block. To add five transactions, a Block Producer must also add five corresponding transaction SNARKs.
Block producers pay snarkers from the overall transaction fees they receive for adding new blocks. Note that a snarker’s zk-SNARK needs to be used in a block while the block producer who uses it is responsible for incentivizing the snarker. In addition, because snarkers are incentivized to produce low-cost SNARKS, it creates a competitive market that benefits users. Mina Protocol is a minimal “succinct blockchain”, and it claims to be the world’s lightest blockchain. It was founded in 2017 by O(1) Labs, a San Francisco-based company comprising a team of researchers and cryptographers, including Evan Shapiro and Izaak Meckler. The goal of the team is to create a more accessible and lightweight blockchain network.
What Is Ethereum 2.0? Understanding The Merge
Typically, a perfect blockchain technology would have airtight security, an extensive decentralized network, and an immense capacity to handle huge volumes of transactions. Mina Protocol, the world’s lightest blockchain and its native MINA crypto, seeks to be the perfect blockchain, balancing scalability, decentralization, and security using Zero-Knowledge Proofs. MINA is the native utility token of the Mina protocol that is used to secure the network. Its maximum supply is 1 billion units, of which 841,141,755 (84%) are already in circulation (February 2023).
This is made possible through the use of zk-SNARKs (Zero-Knowledge Succinct disconnect vpn review privacy guides Non-Interactive Argument), a type of cryptographic proof. Zk-SNARKs are, for instance, particularly useful in blockchain identity verification and allow Mina to achieve a high level of privacy and security while maintaining a small footprint. As an example, if B needs to confirm A’s identity, it can send a secret message to A without disclosing what it is and ask it to decode the message with its private key.
A cryptographic technique that allows one party to prove the truth of a statement to another party without revealing any specific details about the statement. Mina is similar to Bitcoin, apart from how it handles transactions, but also employs the account model used in Ethereum. You’ll receive a deep dive on Mina, what you need to know to build a zkApp and a guide to all the resources available to you. We’ll also keep you updated on the latest developer grants and programs. At the heart of Mina protocol is MINA, its native currency, which functions as a utility coin and medium of exchange. To learn more about this project, check out our deep dive of Mina Protocol.
About Mina Protocol
- The protocol is designed to be developer-friendly, with a focus on making it easy to build decentralized applications and other tools on top of the protocol.
- MINA has a market cap of $718.1 million, with the price of MINA currently trading at $0.81.
- The Mina network has a size of only 22 KB, which is miniscule when compared to Bitcoin’s 300 GB blockchain.
With ZK and recursion, computation is computed once and then is rolled up into Mina’s proof of everything, allowing you to scale horizontally. For instance, you can privately prove you have a certain number of social followers or ensure private yet auditable elections to protect individuals’ voting information. The standard is audited and ready-to-use, adding a new layer of functionality to the Mina ecosystem and paving the way for more complex use cases.
Mina Protocol solves this problem with more efficient use of data, and a new technological innovation known as zk-SNARKs. Mina uses the Ouroboros Praos Proof-of-Stake (PoS), a mechanism developed by IOHK, one of the companies behind Cardano. It was designed to be simple, enabling all participants to contribute proportionally based on their stake what is a crypto wallet in the protocol. For starters, Mina is looking to appeal to developers, with a key aim being to ramp up Mina’s power.
ZK Knowledge Base
Mina Protocol uses a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism called Ouroboros Samasika, based on Cardano’s PoS Ouroboros. The primary difference between Mina’s PoS versus others’ is that Ouroboros Samasika achieves consensus without long-term history. Another difference compared to other PoS protocols is that Mina’s PoS consensus system does not involve locking up stakes to validate. Mina employs the Ouroboros Samasika, a type of PoS mechanism specially designed for succinct decentralized networks since it provides bootstrapping from a genesis block. Mina Protocol introduces inflation as a penalty for users holding their tokens without staking. Further decrease in the inflation rate will be subject to Mina Protocol’s governance.
The team remains committed to building and improving payments use-case where previous blockchains have fallen short. The ultimate objective of the Mina network is to develop a decentralized payment framework that effectively verifies system history without depending on any external an advanced regulated and secure crypto trading exchange service. With this, Mina becomes more available to developers via optimized full nodes to run within web apps or smart devices.