MINA protocol claims to be the world’s lightest blockchain, powered by participants.  Mina is building a gateway between the real world and crypto and the infrastructure for the secure, democratic future that everyone deserves.

By design, the entire Mina blockchain is about 22kb, which is the size of a couple of tweets. So participants will be able to quickly synchronize and verify the network.

Most of the blockchain protocols are very heavy as they need intermediaries to run nodes, thus recreating the same old power dynamics. However, Mina is light.  Thus, anyone can connect peer-to-peer and quickly sync to verify the chain. Built on a consistent-sized cryptographic proof, the blockchain will stay accessible even as it scales.

Rather than using brute computing force, Mina makes use of advanced cryptography and recursive zk-SNARKs to deliver true decentralization at scale, which is an elegant solution.

Mina is a layer one protocol that is designed to deliver on the original promise of blockchain true decentralization, scale and security.

With legacy blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum, anytime a participant joins, they need to check every transaction since the beginning of the network to verify correctness.  This amounts to hundreds of gigabytes of data.   Several people cannot afford the computing power that is needed to verify the heavy chains on their own and they are forced to trust increasingly powerful intermediaries. This means that most folks will not be any longer connecting peer-to-peer causing decentralization to suffer, power dynamics to shift, and the network to become more vulnerable to censorship.

MINA Nodes can then store the small proof, as opposed to the entire chain. And as it is consistent size, Mina stays accessible even as it scales too many users and accumulates years of transaction data.

ZK Snarks capture the state of the entire blockchain as a lightweight snapshot and send that around instead of the chain itself. It is like sending your friend a postcard of an elephant, instead of a massive live animal.

When the next block in the network is created, it takes a snapshot of itself with the snapshot of the previous state of the blockchain as the background. That new snapshot will in turn be used as the backdrop for the next block, and so on and so on. Rather amazingly, while it can contain proof of an infinite amount of information, the snapshot always remains the same size.

The modified Ouroboros proof-of-stake protocol maximizes inclusivity in consensus. On Mina, all participants act as full nodes and anyone can take part in consensus, secure the blockchain and hold Mina accountable.