Mina claims to be the world’s lightest blockchain, powered by participants at Only 22kb!!
The idea behind the Mina blockchain is a unique and powerful Recursive method applied to Zk-SNARK.
Let me break this down so I can explain why I think Mina is FIVE star Idea and helps Mina stand out in the crowded L1 space.
Zero-knowledge Proof, the “Zk” part, is an encryption scheme that was generated at MIT why back even before blockchain in the 1980s. The goal is to prove that a specific statement is true to another the other party without disclosing any additional information.
The SNARK part is an acronym that stands for Succinct (small and easy to verify), Non-Interactive (no back and forth needed to verify) Argument of Knowledge (proof of knowledge). Another key component of SNARK is that this requires a trusted setup, which means it requires an initial generation event of the keys needed to construct the proofs required for private transactions and the verification of the proofs.
Now that I hopefully explained Zk-SNARK (high level), this aspect is not exclusive to Mina, as many other blockchains use zK or zK-SNARKs. The part that is really cool and unique is that Mina is using what is called Recursion.
Wikipedia defines recursion as a method of solving a computational problem where the solution depends on solutions to smaller instances of the same problem. In layman’s terms, recursion is a method that calls itself in loops to solve a smaller and smaller piece of itself until the problem is solved.
A visual analogy is "a picture in a picture in a picture," or the effect we have all seen of a mirror in a mirror repeating until it repeats to the point we cannot see it anymore.
So what Mina has done is coupled the proven power zk-SNARK with their proprietary recursive algorithm to design the world’s lightest blockchain, which is only 22kb.
Mina is a cutting-edge idea that gets FIVE stars in my book.
They have been live since July 2021, and they announced over $500K in funding for the first cohort program, which started in Jan 2022. Soon we will see this idea come to fruition with lots of zKapps running on the Mina blockchain. Show Less
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