Mina: World’s Lightest Blockchain Using zk SNARKs

Mina is the first cryptocurrency with a succinct blockchain. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum currently contain hundreds of gigabytes of data, and their blockchains will only grow in size as time goes on. What is Mina Protocol? However, no matter how popular Mina becomes, the blockchain will always have the same size – around 22kb (the size of a few tweets). As a result, participants will be able to swiftly sync and test the network. zk-SNARKs, a sort of succinct cryptographic zero-knowledge proof, have enabled this achievement. When a Mina node creates a new block, it also creates a SNARK proof verifying its validity. The short evidence, rather than the complete chain, can then be stored by all nodes. The Mina protocol offers a decentralised at scale blockchain by eliminating the need to care about block size. As blockchains grow in size, validating data on the blockchain becomes more complex, resulting in the concentration of validators. Mina aims to circumvent this constraint by employing a “simple blockchain,” which requires a fixed amount of time and data to verify the present status of the world (20 kilobytes/10 milliseconds), according to the developers. The recursive composition of zk-SNARKs, which use constant-sized proofs of arbitrary, incremental computations, enables the concise blockchain. This means that the difficulty of verifying the chain is unaffected by its size, retaining the ease with which users...