zk-Snarks

Mina, the world’s lightest blockchain, has launched its mainnet. 

Mina Launches “Tweet-Sized” Blockchain

Backed by leading venture funds like Coinbase Ventures, Three Arrows, and Polychain, the Mina protocol leverages zk-SNARKs for scalability. This technology allows the chain to always remains 22kb–the size of a couple of tweets. 

Since its inception in 2015, the Ethereum blockchain size has grown over 200GB in transactional data, as per Blockchair. The Bitcoin blockchain is much larger and growing fast. 

Instead of saving every transaction, Mina’s zk-SNARKs innovation compresses the chain into a small proof and distributes this proof for validation. 

With the mainnet launch, developers will leverage the protocol to build scalable apps, which the team calls “SNARK-powered applications (Snapps).” Snapps will bank on Mina’s unique ability to connect to any website and use web data with the blockchain in a privacy-preserving manner.

According to Evan Shapiro, CEO and co-founder of O(1) Labs, the creators behind Mina, the mainnet features allow developers to build a “seamless gateway to privately connect the real world with crypto.”

Besides the mainnet release, the team has organized a community sale of native MINA tokens in partnership with crypto exchange CoinList. This includes 75 million tokens or 7.5% of the initial distribution of 1 billion tokens offered to non-US persons only.