Written by: @Fishery

Translated by :@Chendashan_pat

*The full text is about 2400 words, estimated reading time is 5 minutes

We introduced TON in <Ton: a choice for bear market>last week, and up to now, the token price has increased by 50% in only two weeks. Last week, Telegram announced to build an anonymous SIM-free account. At the same time, Telegram APP was upgraded with a Topic 2.0 feature (a chat room similar to Discord's service) to challenge Discord. The team's execution ability and update speed completely exceeded my expectations, but we still need to insist on the principle that we should not react until it reaches the psychological price. The series of the bear market bottoming subjects will continue to update, and please do not have "no bottom fishing chance" anxiety.

In this issue, we introduce you to the lightest blockchain - MINA.

The lightest principle

Mina Protocol claims to be the world's lightest blockchain, at 22kB (now theoretically compressed to 11kB), the size of a few tweets. To explain the rationale behind this, it is important to first clarify the 3 elements that a blockchain needs to have from Mina's perspective.

• The ability to quickly query the status of the blockchain, for example to verify a user's account balance.

• The blockchain state can be guaranteed to be trustworthy without the need to trust any third party.

• Having the ability to broadcast transactions over the network allows information to be delivered fairly.

All of these elements are present in existing blockchain networks, such as Bitcoin and Ether. However, on these traditional blockchains, to be able to participate in the network, you need to download the entire blockchain data. As time passes, the storage cost for nodes to have a complete transaction history will get higher and higher. As a result, the storage cost of traditional blockchain will be unaffordable someday in the future, making the whole ecology unsustainable.

For this scenario, there are new technologies such as 'light clients' to address the storage cost and the long wait for synchronisation. The "light client" can quickly access certain data from the blockchain without synchronising the full history.

Reading the header block can verify whether it matches the blockchain history, and by assuming trust, it can verify whether the rest of the data is correct. However, because the light client requires additional trust to synchronise information sources, it does not meet the second element of the blockchain as defined by Mina.

Mina takes reference from light client principles in its design thinking, using zk-SNARK lightweight proofs to eliminate the need for ever-growing data storage. And because the zk-SNARK itself guarantees that the data is trusted (if the data is incorrect, the SNARK will not be generated), there is no need to introduce trust in any other node, which satisfies the second element.

Mina nodes are called "non-consensus nodes" and have the same security as full nodes. Non-consensus nodes in Mina can verify the entire blockchain and accounts in the blockchain's SNARK-certified ledger in a trustless manner, just like any other larger and (in terms of synchronisation time and space) more costly full node on other networks (e.g., Bitcoin or Ether).

Moreover, this zero-knowledge proof does not show the account of interaction, and the node keeps only the history of the last 290 blocks, which better protects privacy. According to the demonstration, only 11 kB of data is needed today to represent and verify the entire blockchain, which is even smaller than the official claim that the entire Mina blockchain is about 22 kB.

However, it is important to note that the proof of zk-SNARK-associated data does not contain explicit information such as account balance, which does not meet the first element of "availability" of data in the blockchain.

Therefore, this non-consensus node cannot participate in the consensus and cannot be considered a full node, and SNARK miners (Workers) and block producers (Block Producers) are needed to perform consensus duties in the network. The miners will pool the computed proofs into the Snark marketplace, and the block producers will pay a fee to the miners according to the market mechanism while obtaining the proofs.

Thanks to its lightest weight feature, Mina makes its non-consensus nodes run on smartphones or browsers. Each user can run their node, greatly improving decentralisation. In contrast, other blockchains, such as Bitcoin and Solana, require industrial-grade machines.

The network cannot know who the next block producer will be, and multiple block producers may qualify. This ambiguity increases the protocol’s security to prevent denial-of-service attacks on block producers.

Mina also has a strong anti-censorship feature. For a transaction to be successfully censored, all SNARK miners must refuse to provide SNARK proofs, or all block producers must refuse to add SNARK transactions to the block. The network is decentralised under Mina's consensus mechanism, and block producers cannot collude.

Collusion between all SNARK miners is very difficult. First, anyone can generate a SNARK proof of a transaction at a low cost and earn a SNARKing fee. Even if the transaction fees are low, block producers should be able to pack a transaction in a block.

Financing

· In March 2018, Mina development company O(1) Labs received a $3.5 million seed round of funding from Polychain Capital, MetaStable, Electric Capital and others.

· In April 2019, O(1) Labs received $15 million in Series A funding from Coinbase Ventures, Accomplice and Paradigm, among others.

· In October 2020, O(1) Labs received $10.9 million in funding from HashKey, Signum Capital, NGC Ventures, Distributed Capital, and IOSG Ventures, among others.

· In April 2021, MINA launched on the Coinlist platform, raising $18.7 million.

· In March 2022, FTX and Three Arrows Capital led a $92 million investment.

· MINA began its project as early as 2018, successfully ambushing the recently hot zero-knowledge proof track, reflecting the team's vision, and the MINA team has completed a complete round of bull and bear traversal in the past 4 years, and still maintains intense development and marketing to this day, enough to reassure investors who are now bottoming out in the bear market. MINA and its parent company, O(1) Labs, have received much attention from top VCs, as shown by their funding records. However, there are two major flaws in MINA's portfolio from the current perspective, which will be discussed in the last section of this article.

Where to buy MINA coins

Mina's PoS pledge mechanism, which can be unlocked at any time, provides a 9.5% annualised white whoring return for users who mention it to the chain without additional risk, making it even better to keep coins on the chain.

Revenue nodes staking MINA tokens have a chance of winning a block out proportional to the number of Mina in the node according to the consensus mechanism; for example, if a node holds 5% of the available MINA in the network, they theoretically have a 5% chance of being selected to produce a future block.

The prerequisite for staking MINA tokens is to have a reliable node running on the server, which most users do not have the technical ability to do, so the delegate feature helps users to delegate their MINA tokens to another node running the staking service.

This process is called delegated staking and the delegated service provider may charge a percentage commission. However, delegated pledge service providers are not 100% reliable, so do your due diligence before choosing a staking pool.

For example, the node commissioned is not very stable (when the node drops, the user loses part of the revenue), whether the commission fee ratio of the node is higher than the average price, etc.

Issues to be wary of.

1. Throughput is too low

   Currently, Mina's TPS (transactions per second) is only 1, which is a huge gap compared to the 14TPS of the overcrowded Ethereum. The official explanation of the team is currently focused on stability, and the future will be adjusted for performance. Similar to the short board effect, the advantages mentioned above will only help if you improve the TPS. The community has discussed the topic of expansion in the forums, but it is retracing the upgrade route of Ether, and it remains to be seen if it will work. Of course, Mina may intend to refrain from competing with other new public chains in terms of throughput. It is trying to maximise decentralization without a theoretical limit on the number of nodes.

   Community discussion on plans to achieve higher throughput. https://minaprotocol.com/node-operators

2. Financing risk

   Although MINA's official Twitter account stated in early November that "MINA has no funds in FTX and there is no official partnership between MINA and Alameda," the official tweet said that "MINA has no funds in FTX and there is no official partnership between MINA and Alameda. FTX and Three Arrows Capital led MINA's latest round of funding with nearly $100 million. We are curious if the financing is secure now.

In addition, although Binance has uploaded the MINA spot, the trading volume is minimal. At the same time, Binance did not participate in the financing of MINA. In the current market environment, Binance's operational resources have unparalleled advantages, and MINA wants to stand out in the zk race, most likely without the help of Binance.

Summary

MINA has the luxury of institutional investment, has been in development for 4 years without major slip-ups, and the team is trustworthy. According to the team's announcement, the EVM cross-chain bridge based on MINA zk technology has entered the audit process and is expected to be launched in Q4. As a user who needs to learn about zk, you can add MINA to your optional list first and then wait for the MINA cross-chain bridge to go live to experience it before making a investment.

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