MINABTC
MINA / Bitcoin
crypto Composite

Mina is a "lightweight" smart contract platform with aspirations to be a global payment system. It aims to address the scalability issues present in existing blockchains where the cost to verify the blockchain grows proportionally with total transaction throughput. In these cases, the cost of running a network node eventually exceeds the resources available to most real-world users. The goal of Mina is to design a decentralized payment system that offers efficient verification of system history from genesis without relying on any external advice. This is achieved by the following properties: A formal notion of a "succinct blockchain" Generic functionalities modeled as replicated state machines using incrementally computable SNARKs Concrete implementation of a payments system called Mina Ouroboros Samasika, a provably-secure PoS consensus protocol that is adaptively secure and offers bootstrapping from genesis. Parallel scan state to improve transaction confirmation time beyond the limits otherwise imposed by the proof construction. Performance evaluation report of executing the protocol involving a public community. Typically as blockchains scale in size, it becomes increasingly burdensome to validate data on the blockchain leading to the centralization of validators. Mina looks to avoid this limitation by utilizing what the team calls a succinct blockchain that requires a constant amount of time and data to verify the current world state (20 kilobytes/10 milliseconds). The succinct blockchain is enabled by the recursive composition of zk-SNARKs which use constant-sized proofs of arbitrary, incremental computations. This means the complexity to verify the chain is independent of its' size preserving the ease with which users can actively participate in the network. Rather than preserving the whole chain, a user simply needs to hold onto the current state using a SNARK (succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge) to certify its' existence. This allows Mina to scale to thousands of transactions per second and requires orders of magnitude fewer resources than PoW blockchains to maintain.