Starting from the team, operation mechanism, financing progress, economic model, and Coinlist public offering tutorial, a comprehensive analysis of the lightweight protocol Mina Protocol.
Original title: “A detailed explanation of Mina Protocol features, operating mechanism and Coinlist participation tutorial｜CryptoJ project quick review”
Written by: CryptoJ
Starting from the recent high gas fees, everyone is clearly aware of the importance of on-chain scalability. In fact, Ethereum’s network problems don’t stop there. For example, the full-node storage of data is becoming more and more onerous. When the blockchain becomes overcrowded, all on-chain activities will consume a lot of resources and costs.
Mina Protocol , a main lightweight protocol came into being. It aims to put aside heavy blockchain activities and make the sending status of the entire blockchain as simple as sending a postcard, that is, people can choose to draw on the postcard. Send out any icons such as elephants, lions, etc., without sending a large living animal itself.
Analysis of Mina Protocol
Mina Protocol (formerly Coda Protocol) is a lightweight blockchain proof protocol based on zero-knowledge proof zkSNARKs. Using zkSNARKs, the blockchain can be encapsulated in a single, verifiable, and lightweight protocol. The block chain size has been compressed from a few hundred GB to only 22KB.
For example, Ethereum full nodes already need to store 700GB of data, a large part of which is state data (more than 200GB), and since full nodes must save these data to participate in consensus, the rapid growth of state data requires more and more full nodes The higher it is, this will not only increase the operating cost of the full node, but also reduce the degree of decentralization of the network and bring security risks.
In addition to being lightweight, end users can directly use their mobile phones to run and verify Mina’s mainnet and nodes. The Mina testnet has become the fastest-growing POS testnet other than ETH 2.0.
The story behind the team
The team behind Mina Protocol is O(1) Labs, which has been developed by O(1) Labs since June 2017. The O(1) Labs team is composed of well-known cryptographers, engineers, PhDs, and entrepreneurs to help develop the product Push to the market and serve users.
Evan Shapiro, CEO of O(1) Labs, has been interested in cryptocurrency and programming since high school, and later obtained a Bachelor of Computer Science and a Master of Robotics from Carnegie.
Evan Shapiro and Izaak Meckler, CTO of O(1)Labs, met in high school. They often talked about cryptocurrency and its possible impact on the future. Then they met Lzaak again. They were attracted by cryptocurrency and sparked a spark and decided to join crypto field.
Financing process
In March 2018, Mina development company O(1) Labs completed a $3.5 million seed round of financing. Participants include MetaStable, Polychain Capital, Electric Capital, Naval Ravikant, Elad Gil, Linda Xie, Fred Ehrsam, Kindred Ventures, and SciFi VC etc.
In April 2019, O(1) Labs completed a US$15 million Series A round of financing. Participants included Coinbase Ventures, Accomplice, Paradigm, and General Catalyst.
In October 2020, O(1)Labs completed a strategic round of investment of 10.9 million US dollars to accelerate the development of Mina in Asia. The financing was led by Bixin Investment and Three Arrows Capital. Participating institutions also include SNZ, HashKey, Signum Capital, NGC Ventures, Fenbushi Capital, and IOSG Ventures.
Mina operation mechanism
Theoretically speaking, the blockchain is designed in a form where users are responsible. When anyone can enforce rules by verifying an irrevocable public ledger, the power is still in the hands of the majority, not the minority. This decentralized structure enables the network to conduct trustless transactions.
But this is not the case in practice. In traditional blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, when a new participant joins, every transaction since the beginning of the network must be checked to verify correctness, which is equivalent to hundreds of GB of data. Most people cannot afford the computing power required to verify these chains and are forced to trust increasingly powerful intermediaries. This means that most people can no longer make point-to-point connections, which affects the degree of decentralization and makes the network more susceptible to censorship.
Lightweight snapshot
Mina replaces the blockchain with an easy-to-verify, consistent-size encryption certificate, providing a lightweight solution that greatly reduces the amount of data that each user needs to download. Participants do not need to verify the entire chain from the beginning, but use “recursive” zero-knowledge proofs (or zkSNARKs) to fully verify the network and transactions. Nodes can store small proofs without covering the entire chain. At the same time, due to its consistent size, Mina maintains accessibility and can be expanded to more users to obtain accumulated transaction data.
zkSNARKs captures the state of the entire blockchain, and then sends it out as a lightweight snapshot, without the entire chain itself. For example in life, it is like sending an elephant’s postcard to a friend, only one is needed. Post a postcard with an elephant instead of sending a huge, living elephant animal itself.
When the next block in the network is created, it takes a snapshot of the state of the previous block chain as a background to take a snapshot of itself, and the new snapshot will be used as the next block in turn, and so on. The snapshot can contain An unlimited amount of information can always remain the same size at the same time.
Mina’s modified provably secure proof-of-stake protocol (Ouroboros proof-of-stake) can also maximize the inclusiveness of consensus. On the Mina chain, all participants act as complete nodes and can participate in consensus.
“Recursive” zero-knowledge proof technology
Another core technology of Mina is the “recursive” zero-knowledge proof technology. Borrowing the example cited by the Mina Asian technology ambassador to briefly analyze its basic operation principle, “a person wants to prove that he appears in front of a dated building every day. , He can take a selfie with the date every day, so that there will be 365 photos in a year. And we can use some techniques to reduce the number of photos needed, for example, from the next day, when taking selfies every day, With the mobile phone screen showing the photos taken the day before, using the recursive feature, only one photo a year can achieve the same goal (regardless of whether it can be seen clearly).”
Overall, Evan Shapiro once pointed out that what Mina did was to replace the entire transaction history with a lightweight zero-knowledge proof. The proof was only about kilobytes or a few tweets in size, so you only need to look at the small ones. The proof confirms whether the current state of the blockchain is correct. Compared with the entire transaction chain, it is much easier to download the proof. Therefore, Mina’s qualified verification node pool is more inclusive, which is more conducive to decentralization. And availability.
Token Economic Model
MINA is the native token of the network. It is used to pay for block producers and SNARK producers (that is, the role of calculating zero-knowledge proof), and can be used to pledge in the proof-of-stake consensus algorithm to earn MINA token rewards.
MINA is an inflation currency with no upper limit on supply. This decision was made to encourage the high pledge rate in the early stage of the agreement, which will increase the degree of decentralization and security of the agreement. Since the pledge is open to all token holders on the protocol (without the risk of being fined), any token holder can pledge or delegate to other nodes to prevent dilution by inflation.
The initial issuance of MINA tokens is 1 billion, increasing at a rate of 12% in the first year, and all tokens will be gradually unlocked and released within 8 years.
Community (34.8% of initial circulation)
Coinlist public offering (7.5% of initial issuance)
Donation from MINA Foundation (6.0% of initial circulation)
O(1) Labs donated funds (7.5% of initial circulation)
Investors (20.5% of initial issuance)
Core contributors (23.6% of initial circulation)
Coinlist Public Offering Tutorial
Mina Protocol officially announced that it will open a public offering on April 13th on its official partner Coinlist platform.
Community fundraising: April 13-14
Unlimited fundraising: April 16-18
Both rounds of fundraising will start at 22:00 Beijing time
Copy the link below to go to the Coinlist website to register:
After opening the website, click Register Now to start registration
- Fill in your name in the first column
- Fill in your last name in the second column
- Fill in the email in the third column
- Set a password in the fourth column
- Enter the password again in the fifth column
After completing the registration, you will receive an email for verification, go to your email
Click “Verify your email” to complete verification
After that, it will automatically jump back to the Coinlist website, enter your email and password to log in at this time
At this point you will receive another email to verify the new device
Go to the mailbox again and click “Approve this device” to verify your device. Note that the browser used to open the email must be the same as the browser used to open the Coinlist website, otherwise it will loop endlessly.
Then jump to the Coinlist website again and click “Learn More” in the Mina column
Click Register Now
Click Get Started
- First select the type of entity: individual/company/trust
- Fill in the real name: first name / middle name (optional) / last name
- Click Save &Continue
Select Hong Kong in the region column and check the statement below
Fill in the address as shown in the figure, other parts can be filled in truthfully
Click start to take a photo of the passport and perform face recognition. When the circle expands, approach the camera. After completion, fill in the current occupation in the current occupation column.
In order to improve the safety factor, Coinlist requires us to download Google Authenticator for two-step verification. After the download is complete, scan the provided QR code to add Coinlist authentication, or use the key below to enter it in Google Authenticator (the account can be filled in at will)
Next, please look forward to the official start of the public offering~
