Mina: Worlds Lightest Blockchain

Truly decentralized, Data Sovereign, Scalable and Succinct Blockchain

Overview

Mina is the world’s lightest layer-1 blockchain. It is designed to remain at a fixed size of 22 Kb whereas other PoS blockchains are of 300GB+ size and increasing. This allows end-users to run the actual node and verify the network using even their smartphones.

Currently, most of the end-users don’t interact with the blockchains themselves. They depend on infrastructure companies that run full nodes and act as API Gateways like Infura, Alchemy, etc. Running a full node is very expensive since hardware requirement is very high because to verify the transactions they have to maintain the full history of the network. Most of the blockchains are not decentralized when it comes to node operating. These intermediaries or API gateway can go down causing dApps to go offline while the underlying blockchain is running. Recently, there was Infura outage which caused metamask to do down. This makes Mina decentralized in the true sense as every user can run the node and verify the blockchain even using their smartphones.

Technology

Mina uses recursive zero-knowledge proofs to make a succinct blockchain. No matter how many transactions or how many blocks are there, the blockchain size remains constant at 22Kb. zk-SNARK is an acronym for Zero Knowledge Succinct Non-interactive Argument of Knowledge. Zero Knowledge proofs are like finding Waldo in Where's Waldo game without disclosing his position or any other information regarding who is in front, back, or either side of him.

Mina uses zk-SNARKS to combine blocks into single, small proof of certificate. This proof verifies the blockchain state. It ensures that all transactions are validly-formed, signed and that all consensus rules have been correctly followed. Mina uses Pickle's zk-SNARK to maintain the recursive verification proofs like proof in a proof. At a high level, a proof from timestep n+1 can also verify the state of the blockchain at timestep n, meaning that full nodes need only maintain the most recent proof to verify the entire history. This allows Mina to maintain a fixed size regardless of how many transactions. Thus, to verify the blockchain state, a full node only needs to access a single proof which is much easier and smaller to manage than the entire history of the blockchain.

Mina in PoS and uses Ouroboros Samisika consensus mechanism from Cardano protocol with slight modification. It is a decentralized, inclusive, and scalable mechanism as there are no limits on the number of participants. There is no need to communicate among nodes before the block is produced as no one knows the winner until the block is produced. Since nobody knows who the block producer is, it is provably secure. There is no slashing or bonding mechanism like other blockchains.

Creating proofs or snarks for all transactions inside blocks requires some computational effort. This would require block producers to be supercomputers which would lead to centralization. Since Mina wants block production to happen on commodity hardware, they spread the work throughout the network through Snarketplace. It is a marketplace to incentivize these proof of transactions throughout the network. It decouples the block producer hardware requirement irrespective of the number of transactions in the block.

There are two main roles to be played in Snarketpalce: Snarkworkers and Block Producers. The nodes that make the proof of transactions are called Snarkworks. Block producers are those who produce blocks in the network and create snark proof of the blockchain alongside any block they create. The snarketpalce revolves around a fixed size queue which is a kind of shelf of “work to do”. Block producers keep on adding transactions that need to be snarked or verified. Snarkworkers process the transaction by taking the work off the shelf and creating SNARKs out of them with a special unforgeable digitable signature called "Signature of knowledge". This signature contains the fee that Snark is being offered along with the wallet address. Block producers then must purchase the SNARKS from snarkworker before adding more work to the shelf. If there are multiple snarks for a single transaction block producers pick up the cheapest one. Trying to change the public key or steal someone else's work in itself will destroy the SNARK as the Signature is embedded inside the SNARK.

Development

Mina team is currently building SDKs (Software Development Kits) to make it easy for them to build dApps on Mina. These dApps are referred to as SNAPPs (Snark powered decentralized Apps) and use smart contracts powered by zero-knowledge techniques. Once the SDK is released, developers will be able to write SNAPPs with simple TypeScript, making it much easier for projects to get started. Mina’s team is also building a cross-chain bridge that will bridge Mina with Ethereum and other EVM-compatible chains like Polygon, Arbitrium, Avax-C chain, etc. This will not only bring lots of developers and dApps to the Mina ecosystem but also give EVM compatible ecosystem to leverage the capability of the zk-proof technology of Mina.

Use Cases

Mina distinct itself from other L1 blockchains as it is fixed in size which makes it easy for users to run full nodes and actually interact with the blockchain itself. This makes it a truly decentralized blockchain as each user is running its node at scale. This helps maintain blockchain integrity and data privacy. A few of the use cases revolve around cross-chain communication and data sovereignty.

Cross-chain communication is immensely complex, expensive, and risky as it involves verifying the state of the target chain from the source chain. Mina's lightweight design makes it easy for chains to bridge to and be able to access privacy-related features.

Mina provides data privacy by enabling users to share proof of ownership of data instead of sharing real data. Also, the user runs a full node so the data never leaves the user's device, they have to share only the proof.

Currently, the online world and on-chain world live in silos. There is no way to interact with the online world without exposing their personal data and violating their privacy for all to see. With Mina end to end, data privacy is possible and users can use Mina to privately access the online data to meet the requirements of the on-chain world.

The possibilities of building on Mina are endless. For eg: To log in to an account, you need to provide an email id and password but with Mina, you can provide proof that you are the owner of the email id and the app can verify it. This can work for both the on-chain and online worlds. For loan applications instead of sharing the credit score, Mina's snapps can connect to a credit score provider to provide proof that your score is above the threshold limit.

Mina can provide both permissionless and verifiable web oracles. Mina snapps can privately interact safely with a real-world app without disclosing data as data moves from online to on-chain.

Conclusion

Mina is trying to solve a problem that no other Layer 1 blockchains are even talking about. Its light design and fixed-size make it truly a large-scale decentralized product. Most crypto dApps and chains are far less decentralized than we'd like to believe. Apart from decentralization, the zero-knowledge technology of Mina allows apps to leverage a variety of new features including verified off-chain computation. data privacy and efficient cross-chain bridges across chains. However, the technology is still in development, and user adoption needs to be seen but the technology and use cases Mina provides represent a major step in the evolution of layer one blockchains.

Resources:

https://minaprotocol.com/use-cases https://minaprotocol.com/blog/what-are-snark-workers-and-the-snarketplace https://minaprotocol.com/wp-content/uploads/economicsWhitepaper.pdf