Thread by @CroissantEth

I’d like to share with you guys a highly anticipated project that’s been in development for years and is gearing up for mainnet launch on the 16th. Below, I will introduce $MINA protocol, the worlds lightest blockchain.

@MinaProtocol’s #Testworld is officially the largest pos testnet aside from ETH 2.0. The amount of users joining $MINA has been growing rapidly in the final testnet in anticipation of the mainnet launch.

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

By design, the entire $Mina blockchain is and will always be about 22kb - the size of just a couple of tweets.

A key issue seen in legacy block chains like btc and ETH is that when a new participant joins the network, nodes have to check every transaction since the beginning of the network to verify correctness - which amounts to hundreds of gigabytes of data and network congestion.

$MINA offers an elegant solution to this problem by replacing blockchain with an easily verifiable, consistent-sized cryptographic proof.

This method drastically reduces the amount of data each user needs to download. Instead of verifying the entire chain from the beginning, participants of $MINA verify the network using zero knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs).

Here’s a brief description of zk-SNARKS and how they work:

zk-SNARKS are a technological breakthrough in the crypto current field, and are a huge step towards achieving scalable blockchain technology.

Here’s what vitalik has to say about them: coindesk.com/500-transactio…

Speaking of, recently there’s been a joint RFP between ETH & Mina to efficiently verify SNARKs on the EVM.

“The goal of this is to enable full-verification of the Mina blockchain on Ethereum and to enable applications more generally to use SNARKs on ETH”
hackmd.io/u_2Ygx8XS5Ss1a…

Now that we’ve gone over the basics, let take a dive and see who’s behind all the magic.

The team consists of several software developers from a diverse set of backgrounds, including prior work at Coinbase, terra, kraken, Mozilla, and INTEL.

The names backing Mina protocol would be too long to list, but I’ll point out some of the important ones here:

-Coinbase Ventures
-Dragonfly Capital
-HASHKEY
-MetaStable
-Naval Ravikant (CEO of AngelList)
-Signum capital
-Paradigm
-Polychain capital
-Threearrows capital

Mina has raised a significant amount of funds from investors dating all the way back to 2017.

coindesk.com/coinbase-parad…

decrypt.co/45796/o1-labs-…

Okay. But what is the $MINA token? $MINA is the native token of the Mina blockchain, and is required to participate in block production and purchasing of SNARK proofs, via the Snarketplace.

MINA is inflationary with no supply cap. All tokenholders can stake to receive their proportional fraction of the inflation (block rewards) with no lockup or bonding required to do so.
There will be a total of 1B MINA distributed at launch, which will fully unlock over 8 years.

It is worth noting that the majority of MINA tokens are timelocked, so the circulating supply will start off small, and increase overtime. There are 3 ways new MINA tokens are created.
1)Block rewards
2)creating new tokens
3)Hard forks

In contrast, staking supply represents all tokens in existence (both locked and unlocked). All $MINA is eligible for staking, no matter their lock status. As a result, staking supply increases only with block rewards.

In summary, Mina is the worlds lightest and scalable blockchain with cutting edge zSNARK technology and novel Snapps use cases.

With the possibility of massively increasing ETH’s tx throughputs, I believe zSNARKs will be one of the biggest use cases for ETH in the near future.

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