Mina (MINA)

What is MINA?

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.

Outstanding Features

What is the project trying to achieve?

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.

What is the unique selling point?

Mina is similar to Bitcoin, apart from how it handles transactions, but also employs the account model used in Ethereum.

In this respect, the difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum is that the state of the Bitcoin blockchain contains a list of unspent coins, while Ethereum’s state is made up of account balances.

Mina, on the other hand, uses a prover (or snarker, if you will), an equivalent of a miner, to ensure each block commits to the state.

Mina employs the Ouroboros Samasika, a type of PoS mechanism specially designed for succinct decentralized networks since it provides bootstrapping from a genesis block.

Succinct blockchains contain two major functions: verify and update. Verification touches on consensus, blockchain summary and blocks, while the update function interacts with consensus and chain summary.

Apart from the above implementations, the project uses a parallel scan state to optimize transaction processing speed, which works by grouping unproven blocks and assigning the process to parallel provers.

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