TL;DR: With a new update or project being released almost every day, it’s clear the crypto ecosystem is constantly evolving. Mina has gone through a lot of ups and downs to reach the level it’s at today — but it’s just the beginning. Knowing what brought it here and why it was created will lead you to make better decisions when investing or simply using Mina.
In this article, we’re gonna dive into the Mina ecosystem, answer all the $MINA related questions and even more. Prepare yourself for a history lesson and a journey to the future of Mina!
What is Mina (MINA)?
Mina Protocol is a Layer 1 blockchain created in 2017 by Evan Shapiro and Izaak Meckler. It is a smart contract platform that focuses on solving the scalability problem found in Proof of Work blockchains.
Scalability is defined as the amount of transactions that Mina Protocol can process per second, or throughput. The key problem with scalability is that the size of blockchains grows as more transactions are processed. In order to participate in the consensus, a validator must run a full node that contains all the network’s transaction history.
Mature blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum contain more than 175 GB and more than 440 GB historical data respectively. This puts a great deal of pressure on miners and validators to run and sync a node. First of all, they need to have enough disk space to run a node. Secondly, they need to wait days or weeks before the full blockchain gets synced.
To solve this issue, Mina Protocol employs a series of compression techniques that leverage zk-SNARKs. The technology stems from Zero Knowledge, a cryptography method that has been around since the 90s’. Early blockchains such as Zcash were among the first to implement Zero Knowledge into their protocol.
Mina makes use of a ZK variation called Zero Knowledge Succind Non-Interactive Proof of Knowledge, or zk-SNARKS. Both ZK and zk-SNARKs have the ability to produce proof that an information is valid without revealing it. The internal mechanisms of producing the proof are more complex than that.
To keep things simple, we will stick to the definition of Zero Knowledge: a method by which one party can prove to another party that a given statement is true while the prover avoids conveying any additional information apart from the fact that the statement is indeed true.
As mentioned previously, legacy blockchains continue to grow in size. Mina’s thesis is that relying on third-party services such as Infura or Alchemy to run a node represents a massive point of centralization. In such scenario, users need to trust these third parties to propagate their transactions to the network. The team wanted to keep storage costs accessible so that anyone can run a node.
With its unique implementation of zk-SNARKs, the team at Mina claims the size of their blockchain is at a constant 22 kb, the size of a couple tweets. This is a unique feat, never before seen in the world of crypto.
In a legacy blockchain, validators need to hold a copy of the blockchain. Based on the previous transactions, new transactions are being included in the blocks. The team figured they could produce a zk-SNARK proof of each validated block. The proof can be used as the basis for adding the next blocks, and so on. Mina’s compression technique works like taking a picture of a picture. Nodes keep a copy of the proof instead of the entire transaction history, which remains at a size of around 22 kb.
The only challenge with the compression technique is that creating those zk-SNARKs (aka proofs) is expensive. The deal is to spend computational resources on creating the proof which can later be verified with close to zero costs.
Once again, Mina’s solution was to create a marketplace where zk-SNARKs producers are incentivized to produce those proofs, they call it the “Snarketplace.” To keep Mina fixed at a small size, block producers must purchase completed SNARK work before adding new proofs. This is similar to buying your way into the checkpoint of the latest block. This way, zk-SNARK producer get paid for their efforts, and new players can contribute to the decentralization.
The consensus mechanism that Mina Protocol uses is a flavor of Proof of Stake called Ouroboros Samasika. Proof of Stake means that Mina Protocol gets its security from validators that stake $MINA to secure the chain. This is different from Proof of Work blockchains, where miners replace the role of validators.
Mina Protocol has a booming ecosystem that grows daily, all powered by its native token. The native token of Mina Protocol, $MINA, is used actively throughout the network, from validators to users.
The concept of blockchains is not new, and Mina Protocol is one of many such networks. The idea started in 2007 with the release of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin Whitepaper. This kicked off the subsequent creation of many different types of networks under the same “blockchain” terminology. Despite being similar in concept blockchains have all different architectures and use cases.
What all have in common — including Mina Protocol — is that they have to be secure. Security is the ability of a blockchain to prevent attacks and penalize malicious actors. This is usually done through their consensus algorithm and the mechanism they use to reach finality.
Finality is achieved when a block has been created and is now immutable, meaning that nobody can change the date inside. Over time many different mechanism have been designed, ranging from Proof of Work, Proof of Stake to novel ones called Proof of Spacetime. Each one hopes to achieve the best way of securing the network they are built for. As noted before, Mina Protocol makes use of type of consensus mechanism we call “Proof of Stake” — or PoS for short.
Mina Protocol’s was created with the goal of working as a payments network. Besides regular transfers, the protocol has its own versions of smart contracts that unlock new use cases.
Ethereum has been created in 2014 and introduced the concepts of smart contracts. These are small applications that run inside a virtual machine called the Ethereum Virtual Machine. The EVM allows for a blockchain to process more than simple token transfers. To give more info, it opened up the possibility to run applications in a decentralized manner.
Applications usually run in the cloud or on your computer, so running them on a blockchain was unheard of at the time. This makes them uncensorable (nobody can stop them) and ensures they’re always online — as long as the chain they run on is processing transactions.
Both Mina and Ethereum enable the creation of Dapps. While similar to Ethereum, Mina implements some unique improvements. The first one is making the verification process faster and more efficient.
In order to check the execution of a dapp, all nodes and miners on the Ethereum network must perform the same calculation, wasting both energy, time, and money. Mina allows a zkApp to be executed only once by its author, after which all other nodes will verify the SNARK proof associated with it. Because the proof is small in size, verifying the execution of a zkApp takes the same amount of resources, no matter how complicated the proof is.
The second one is the concept of privacy, which is innate to every zk-SNARK implementation. The information we give when using a zkApp is verified for its validity by the protocol, but it never reveals it to the verifier. This makes Mina smart contracts a powerful tool for creating dApps with guaranteed privacy.
Mina Protocol is powered by the MINA token, a central part of the Mina Protocol ecosystem. MINA is an inflationary token due to the way its tokenomics have been planned. This means that new MINA coins are created with each block and the amount in circulation expands.
The Mina Protocol inflation rate sits currently at around 10% and aims to stabilize at 7%. This decision was made in order to incentivize a high level of staking participation in the early years of the protocol, which will increase the level of decentralization.
Mina Protocol has no maximum amount of tokens that can be created. As of 2022, the total supply of $MINA is at 824 million, and it keeps increasing.
For more details about how you can earn more Mina by running a validator node at home check out our Mina Mining & Staking guide. It includes the exact steps and best methods of earning more crypto like $MINA in 2024 and beyond.
When was Mina (MINA) created?
Mina Protocol (MINA) was created during Evan Shapiro and Izaak Meckler’s incursion into the blockchain technology. Work began on the Mina Protocol chain in 2017, but before that, a couple of important events happened. Most events revolve around the evolution of zk-SNARKS and the Mina Protocol co-founders.
The first meaningful event is when zk-SNARKs took off in the world of blockchain.
Zk-SNARKs stands for Zero Knowledge Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge. For some historical context, zero-knowledge proofs were first conceived in 1985 by Shafi Goldwasser, Silvio Micali, and Charles Rackoff in their paper “The Knowledge Complexity of Interactive Proof-Systems.”
The paper described a concept in which information between a prover and a verifier can be authenticated by the prover, without revealing any specific information other than the information is true.
Imagine going to the supermarket and purchasing a beer with your ID without revealing your personal information to the merchant. A smart ID using zero-knowledge proof could attest that you are old enough to buy alcohol, but it won’t reveal your age. From the example, we can tell Zero Knowledge proofs have serious implications.
With earlier ZK verification systems there was one big issue. For it to work, the prover and the verifier had to be online at the same time — the process was “interactive”. This made the entire system inefficient and almost impossible to scale up. The verifiers couldn’t possibly be online at the same time as provers all the time? There needed to be a system to make this more efficient.
Going into detail about how to make zk-SNARKs non-interactive involves some black magic cryptography which we will not detail in here. In short, for a non-interactive ZK proof, the verifier is replaced by a hash function which doesn’t require for the prover and the verifier to be online at the same time.
Zcash is the first example of a blockchain that implemented zk-SNARKs. The Zcash network aims to provide privacy for its users without revealing details to anyone. When Izaak Meckler enrolled for his PhD, he had the chance to study with professor Alessandro Chiesa, one of the co-founders of Zerocash protocol and Zcash.
Another meaningful event was the moment Evan Shapiro and Izaak Meckler decided to create their blockchain using zk-SNARKs.
Evan and Izaak had founded O(1) Labs, a remote company that would pioneer the zero-knowledge-proofs in Web3. Their first project was Mina Protocol, at the time called Coda Protocol.
The team was looking to solve a major technical challenge in the crypto space: making participation in consensus easier.
At that time, the only way to participate in a protocol consensus meant running a node. Legacy blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum had become incredibly alt="Evan Shapiro">
Evan Shapiro started his career working at Mozilla as a software engineer intern where he worked at the company for three months. Right out of the university, Evan started focusing on his research in Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge, or “zk-SNARKs.” This field of research is related to cryptography and represented a high level introduction for Evan to the wider crypto ecosystem.
For the next two years, Evan studied distributed systems and verifiable computation. Back in 2015, zk-SNARKs was a popular field of study in the small circles of cryptography. Zero knowledge proofs received more interest after the first public blockchains emerged. Unlike prior methods, zk-SNARKs wouldn’t require interaction between the prover and verifier outside of a single message.
Evan Shapiro and his childhood friend, Izaak Meckler, saw the value of implementing a blockchain such qualities. So they’ve decided to start O(1) Labs, a company focused on solving the centralization and data security issues behind blockchains.
O(1) Labs eventually incubated a light blockchain called Coda Protocol, to address the mentioned challenges. Later on, Coda was rebranded to Mina Protocol.
Izaak Meckler now serves as the CTO of O(1) Labs. Izaak studied at the University of Chicago between 2011 and 2015, where he graduated with a bachelor in mathematics and computer science. During his time in university, he worked as a programmer teaching assistant and worked as a software engineer intern at Quixey and Jane Street Capital.
Upon graduating, Izaak landed a full time job at Jane Street Capital where he worked for a year. He then enrolled for his PhD at Berkeley and went on to become a co-founder at O(1) Labs with his long-time friend, Evan Shapiro.
Izaak’s first contact with crypto was in 2010. He quickly understood that blockchain is as revolutionary as the internet, and decided to dive deeper into the concepts. At the time, the limitations with the tech really stuck with him. To him it was clear that blockchain tech in its current implementation couldn’t scale without a different approach.
During his PhD, Izaak studied with professor Alessandro Chiesa, a key researcher in zk-SNARKs development and the co-founder of the Zerocash protocol and Zcash. Inspired by the concept of zk-SNARKs, Izaak made a breakthrough with Mina. Due to the success of the protocol, he took a leave from Berkeley to work on the project full time.
Evan Shapiro and Izaak Meckler envisioned a blockchain where every participant could run a node without worrying about storage space. Their motivation was to create the “world’s lightest blockchain.”
A challenge at the time was that blockchains were growing in size linearly. As more transactions were processed, the mode disk space was required to run a node. The first step was to design a blockchain that was more efficient than the existing alternatives.
Their research has led them to the application of zk-SNARKs and its unique properties. To solve the blockchain scaling size, they’ve come up with the recursive ZK-snarks and this is how Mina Protocol was born.
On May 10, 2018, the first version of the whitepaper was released. The proof of concept for Mina, initially called Coda, used zk-SNARKs to compress the entire blockchain into a tiny snapshot and sends around that snapshot instead. That means that no matter how big the blockchain gets, or how many transactions are performed, the cost to verify transactions and data remains constant and inexpensive — accessible to everyone.
The wider vision was to implement all the features we see in blockchains today using ZK. The roadmap for Mina included the creation of zk-based services such as zkApps, zkBridges, ZK Oracles, and more. To advance their concept, Evan Shapiro and Izaak Meckler pitched their idea to VCs and managed to raise $3.5M from investors such as Polychain Capital, Electric Capital, Naval Ravikant, Fred Ehrsam, and many others.
With fresh funding, Evan Shapiro and Izaak Meckler went on to expand their team and turn their idea into a marketable project. Like any successful blockchain network, it was essential that Mina amassed a strong community of validators that could maintain the network during its early stages.
Other early collaborators were awarded with Testnet Points that had no monetary value and were not exchangeable for crypto assets. Right from the start, Mina was betting on long-term thinkers to bootstrap the network. Surprisingly, over 250 people joined the network. Of those, 32 people successfully ran a Mina node, connected to the network, and sent their first transaction. An additional 32 people started playing around in the documentation, and were working on getting their Mina nodes set.
How is the Mina (MINA) token used?
The MINA token is the native token for the Mina Protocol network. Most assets in the Mina Protocol ecosystem are denominated in MINA, which makes it the default unit of account.
MINA is the fuel that powers transactions and block creation on the Mina Protocol chain. We sometimes refer to it as “gas”. Its primary use case is securing the network and keeping actors aligned to the same principles.
Mina block producers add transactions to the blockchain, as well as a new zk-SNARK for every transaction they add. Block producers can also bid on zk-SNARKs, which have been made by Snarkers, rather than create their own. This bidding process incentivizes Snarkers to bid at a low cost, to help ensure their SNARK gets bought on the “Snarketplace.”
Making a transaction on the Mina Protocol network requires a small fee in MINA, usually between 0.001 and 0.004 MINA. Because Mina Protocol has a quick time to finality and processes more transactions per second the gas fees quickly add up. This small fee is paid by users and goes to validators for doing their work.
Recently, Mina Protocol has announced the release of Mina Protocol smart contracts. Its smart contracts are powered by the zero-knowledge tech and bring along additional features, such as privacy and off-chain computation. zkApps have the benefit of executing off-chain computations for a flat fee, paid in $MINA. The fee is required in order to send the ZK proof to the chain. This ensures block producers and snarkers have an incentive to keep the network secure.
Mina is currently listed on multiple exchanges. The major ones are
A year and a half into the Mina testnet, Evan Shapiro and his team established Mina Foundation as a non-profit company with their headquarters in the United States. The board is made of Eva Shapiro (CEO), Joon Kim (General Contractor), and Sherry Lin (Head of Marketing). Recent members include Josh Cincinnati, Formerly of Zcash Foundation, Jill Carlson of Slow Ventures, and Tess Rinearson of Interchain GmbH.
The Foundation is tasked offering support for startups and making sure projects follow the principles of the protocol. They are also in charge of managing the community’s assets.
Founded in 2017, Mina Foundation handles the development of the Mina (MINA) blockchain and protocol. Besides handling the development of the core protocol, it is also tasked with growing awareness of Mina’s technology, attracting the next wave of contributors, and building the community infrastructure.
Parts of the codebase was written by external developers, making open source contributors one of the most important parts of the Mina ecosystem. Their website lists 67 open source contributors in addition to the people who chose to contribute anonymously. Currently, their GitHub lists 24 core developers and the protocol had been forked more than 300 times.
Like any successful blockchain network, it was essential that Mina amasses a strong community of validators that could maintain the network. To attract miners and builders, Mina Foundation started offering grants. The initial sponsorship budget is 45K MINA Tokens and $20K USDC for community contributions.
Before the network mainnet, Mina Foundation offered grants to the Technical Community Ambassadors (TCA), who contributed during the testnet. Each participant received a generous amount of 66,000 MINA tokens
If you are interested to become a contributor to the protocol, you can nominate yourself or someone else in the quarterly Community Grant. One of the criteria is for the project to build zkApps that benefit the community and broader ecosystem.
Another way to get involved is by joining the zkApps Builder Program, ran by O(1) Labs. It is a 12-week online program to support developers who are interested in running zkApps. The goal of the program is to provide direct access to the O(1) Labs team to support developers as they build their first zkApp project and to gather feedback.
Mina Foundation is currently hiring remote workers for technical positions. Some of the open positions are for Developer Relations Engineer, Senior Developer, Technical Product Manager, and Senior Manager for the protocol governance.
Governance of the Mina Protocol is done off-chain. This means token holders have a say in the direction of the protocol, but the upgrade implementation is done by the core team.
Token holders can vote to modify on a variety of parameters such as a change to the network protocol, a change in consensus or block validity rules, to the zero-knowledge cryptography or any change in the accounts or rules around MINA. The primary mechanism of proposing new features is done via Mina Improvement Proposals (MIPs).
During its early stages, Mina Foundation is run by a board. The team intends to decentralize governance of the Mina Protocol, and let token holders be in charge of the funding allocation. To sustain its decentralization efforts, Mina Foundation delegates its tokens to block producers in the community through the Foundation Delegation Program.
What are the latest updates on Mina (MINA)?
Mina in 2019
2019 was a preparation year for Coda. The team has focused exclusively on testing its protocol for the anticipated 2020 mainnet. Hang on tight, as we will dive deep into the testing phases.
Mina Foundation kicked off 2019 with a fundraise of $15 million from VCs. Over the course of the previous year, the team had released Snarky, its in-house programming language designed to make zk-SNARK programming efficient. They had also completed Coda’s first testnet, running the world’s first succind blockchain.
What followed next was the Beta testnet. The launch was made in phases, each focusing on a specific area of the protocol.
During Phase 1, the community ran a SNARK work challenge where node operators on the Mina network ran SNARK worker nodes and helped compress transactions. This resulted in 4192 SNARK proofs produced.
Phase 2 ran for one week and had 126 members involved. The blockchain was specifically tested for durability and high uptime. Each day, the team lowered block times, improved throughput and ramped up protocol parameters to ensure faster finality.
Although 2019 wasn’t rich in terms of events, the number of community members grew from 250 to thousands. Hundreds of nodes were ran by the community all across the world and helped confirm that Coda is on the right track with its approach. At this point, Coda had no incentive structure other than leaderboard points. Apparently, the first community members were attracted by the vision of the project, and offered to lend a hand.
Things would turn out to be more interesting in the next year, as Coda was preparing for the genesis block. This means validators would be able to participate in the consensus and get rewarded for it.
Mina in 2020
In 2020, Coda Protocol would speed up its efforts of decentralization by incentivizing its validators.
One of the first steps was the release of Coda’s economics whitepaper to showcase its monetary policy. Along the same line, Coda launched Genesis, a token program that prepares participants to contribute to the network’s consensus.
Coda token grants were distributed to Genesis founding members determined from the pool of participants engaged in testnet. Up to one thousand Genesis founding members would be selected to receive Coda tokens by completing challenges on the testnet to help strengthen and harden the network. When the mainnet goes live, Genesis founding members will comprise the network’s initial block producers, as they will have gained the technical knowledge required to stake tokens.
Unlike other third-generation protocols offering 1% or less in token distributions to their communities, Coda set aside up to 6.7% of tokens for Genesis founding members. Additionally, participants would receive their tokens right after the mainnet.
With the release of the Genesis program, Coda had become one of the largest testnets by peer count. Phase 3 of the testnet has generated more than 400 users connecting at least once, with 300 users signing up to stake.
In anticipation of the mainnet, Coda Protocol announced the allocation of $2.1 million in $MINA grants. The funds were granted to community members and teams engaged in any endeavor deemed to support the growth and development of Coda, which includes developing the protocol, building tooling, organizing meetups, as well as creating and reviewing new content and resources.
On September 29, Coda protocol has rebranded to Mina. Besides the name change, the entire website had been revamped to better reflect the project’s image. A month later, O(1) Labs, the team behind Mina, raised $10.9 million from VCs such as 3 Arrows Capital, HashKey Capital, and Signum Capital, among others.
At the end of the year, Mina launched its adversarial testnet to uncover vulnerabilities and ensure the network is resilient in the lead-up to mainnet. Participants were promised up to 1% of the total supply in token rewards across both adversarial and concurrent bug bounty programs.
With 780/1000 slots still available for the Genesis grants, there was still plenty of room for more people to join in. As of 2020, more than 1,200 users from over 180 countries have participated on the Mina testnet, with 10,000+ community members participating in the greater Mina ecosystem.
Mina in 2021
2021 was Mina Protocol’s best year to date, reaching an all time high of $9.91. This was heavily influenced by a few key events and updates.
The biggest event was the Mina mainnet. Launched on March 23, it represents the culmination of 3 years of arduous preparations. Now that Mina has launched on mainnet, developers would soon be able to leverage the protocol to create decentralized SNARK-powered applications (zkApps), bringing privacy and data security to users around the globe.
The same day after the mainnet, Mina announced its plans to hold a token sale for the retail investors. 75 million tokens were be available in the sale, at $0.25 per token, which equates to $18.75 million.
Furthermore, Mina Foundation was expected to offer nearly 600 additional grants to eligible community members who have accumulated high numbers of leaderboard points through their participation in the Mina community over the past 1.5 years. The new grants program, Prism, will be doubling its grantee base to around 1,200 grantees and distributing up to in total 3.1 million tokens to the new Prism members.
On May 5, Mina concluded its token sale via CoinList. Mina garnered more than 40,500 purchasers. The token sale was a resounding success, selling out in 4 hours with 8.8X more demand than supply.
The bull run from 2021 helped $MINA appreciate in value, resulting in thousands of new members joining. With a stable protocol and plenty of users, Mina was ready to get into partnerships. One of them was with Polygon. Both teams started working towards implementing support for Mina on Polygon’s PoS chain. This bridge would enable developers building applications on Polygon to leverage privacy and verifiability via Mina’s zk-SNARK-based protocol.
Polygon offered lower fees and faster transactions for developers building on EVM applications. The partnership with Mina added the value of privacy and helped create interoperability between the protocols.
Some ideas of zkApps include private IDs, Proof of Assets, Proof of Trade, private DAO voting, passport on-chain, and any other service that involves working with private data. These ideas had been laid out by Mina Foundation, who pledged their support for anyone trying to build them.
Mina’s work on zk-SNARKs was noticed by the Ethereum Foundation, who decided to award a $1.2M contract to the Crypto3 team at =nil; Foundation. This would allow Mina to be verified on Ethereum, and other EVM based chains such as Polygon, allowing dapps on other chains to access Mina’s zkApps.
Mina in 2022
The current year has been a powerful one for Mina Protocol. With the release of the mainnet, Mina started focusing on the apps being build on top of its zk-SNARKs protocol.
One of the first zkApps in development was Proof of Alpha, a zkApp that verifies profit percentage on cryptocurrency or stock trades. The goal was to prove the credibility of trades without disclosing the financial details. This idea worked out great in the context of influencers taking screenshots of their “trades” without showing proof.
On March 3, Mina secured $92 million through a private sale led by FTX Ventures and Three Arrows Capital, among others. In the light of the insolvency of FTX and 3AC, Mina protocol didn’t seem to be affected as they’ve had more investors than the 2 mentioned.
Besides working on zkApps, Mina Foundation has been focused on improving its delegation program. The Foundation is gradually getting decentralized by giving away its voting power to the validator community.
By the end of the year, 10+ zkApps have been announced, each funded by the Mina Foundation. Some of them address the wallet privacy element, while others work on digital IDs powered by zk-SNARKs.
The founders of Mina along with several members from the Ethereum Foundation believe that Zero-Knowledge proofs will be the future of a borderless and permissionless Web3. In 2022, the crypto industry has been under assault by governments, demanding censorships of certain protocols and actors. Users in Venezuela and Ukraine have seen their access to third-party node providers censored.
ZKPs allow users to privately share information to the decentralized network while giving networks a secure guarantee that the data is authenticated. Zooming out, ZKPs are believed to be the next frontier in the crypto industry.
Mina is in a constant growth cycle, and network participants like us can earn more $MINA without too much hassle or technical knowledge, right from the comfort of our homes. Learn how to do that in our Mina Mining & Staking guide, which includes the exact steps and best methods of earning more crypto like $MINA in 2022 and beyond.