Mina Protocol

Mina is a "lightweight" smart contract platform with aspirations to be a global payment system. It aims to address the scalability issues present in existing blockchains where the cost to verify the blockchain grows proportionally with total transaction throughput. In these cases, the cost of running a network node eventually exceeds the resources available to most real-world users. The goal of Mina is to design a decentralized payment system that offers efficient verification of system history from genesis without relying on any external advice. This is achieved by the following properties: A formal notion of a “succinct blockchain” Generic functionalities modeled as replicated state machines using incrementally computable SNARKs Concrete implementation of a payments system called Mina Ouroboros Samasika, a provably-secure PoS consensus protocol that is adaptively secure and offers bootstrapping from genesis. Parallel scan state to improve transaction confirmation time beyond the limits otherwise imposed by the proof construction. Performance evaluation report of executing the protocol involving a public community.