What Is Mina (MINA)?

Mina is the first cryptocurrency network with a succinct blockchain. Succinct blockchain is the replicated state machine in which each transition can be verified efficiently in constant time, nonetheless the number of prior transitions in the system. Also, Mina is the lightest blockchain globally, powered by a whole new generation of participants.

According to the whitepaper of Mina, the platform offers a payment system with a fast verification time of 200 ms, thus making it easy for lightweight clients and mobile devices to complete verification of the system’s history.

Mina was introduced when it was observed that decentralization for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies comes at the cost of scalability. These cryptocurrencies use decentralized payment systems to make and verify payments. However, it was found that verifying and downloading the transaction history with these cryptocurrencies takes days on a typical laptop. Such cryptocurrencies hold hundreds of gigabytes of data, and as time goes on, the blockchains also increase in size.

Thus comes succinct blockchain with a mission to design a decentralized payment system that offers efficient verification of system history from the origin without relying on any external advice. No matter how much the usage grows for Mina, the blockchain always stays the same in size, i.e., about 22 kb (the size of a few tweets). Participants can easily sync and verify the network at Mina on their devices.

Moreover, this mission is achieved by including zk-SNARKs—a kind of succinct cryptographic proof. Every time the Mina node creates a new block, a SNARK proof is generated and proof verifying that the block was valid. After this verification, all nodes can store the small proof instead of the entire chain. Thus without worrying about the size of a block, the Mina protocol enables a decentralized blockchain at scale.

zk-SNARKs captures the entire blockchain as a relatively lightweight snapshot and sends that around instead of the chain itself. At the time of creating the next block in the network, zk-SNARKs takes a snapshot of itself with the snapshot of the initial state of the blockchain as the background. This process goes on and on in the same manner. This snapshot remains of the same size even after having too much information.

History of Mina (MINA)

Mina was launched in 2020 after going through several testnet phases. The economic whitepaper of Mina was released in October 2020, and the technical whitepaper was released in March 2020. 

Mina Foundation’s board of directors includes Evan Shapiro (CEO of Mina Foundation), Josh Cincinnati, and Jill Carlson. Evan Shapiro has worked as a software engineer at Mozilla, and Josh Cincinnati worked as the former executive director at Zcash Foundation. Jill Carlson is the principal of Slow Ventures. She has done academic research on cryptocurrency at the University of Oxford.

How to Create New (MINA) Tokens

As cryptocurrencies are becoming popular, the cost to verify the blockchain is increasing proportionally with total transactions throughput. Also, it is becoming out of reach for most real-world users. Mina protocol solves this problem by replacing blockchain with verifiable proof. Users can verify the current state with zk-SNARK, no matter how many network transactions. 

Mina has three roles in the network:

Verifiers: Mina uses zk-SNARKs to prove state validity. Zk-SNARKs take a few milliseconds of computing to verify.

Block producers: Block producers are similar to miners or stakers in other protocols. Block producers are incentivized in the form of block rewards or transactions and network fees paid by users. Along with direct staking, the users can delegate their stake to another block producer. Delegation offers the benefit of not maintaining a node connected to the network every time.

To ensure the blockchain remains succinct, block producers need to SNARK an equivalent number of previously added transactions for each transaction that block producers add to the block. If this is not done, the entire block won’t comply with the consensus rules and will get rejected by other nodes.

For instance, if the block producer wants to add ten transactions to the back of the queue, they must SNARK 10 transactions from the front of the line.

Snarkers: Snarkers are the network participants who produce zk-SNARKs to verify transactions. They are provided with posting fees for producing zk-SNARKs. The fees are paid from the transaction fees that the block producer would otherwise get.

The individual units of the cryptocurrency are known as Mina. The initial supply of the cryptocurrency Mina is 1,000,000,000, and each Mina is divisible into 1 billion units known as nanomina.