What is Mina Crypto?
Mina protocol is a blockchain that was launched in mid-March 2021, after 3 years of development. The project was sponsored by well-known venture capitalists such as “Multicoin Capital” or “Coinbase Ventures”, also known for investing in the developing DeFi space. These companies saw in the Mina protocol potential to solve many of the problems that the industry is facing right now. It had an initial coin offering in April 2021, and began trading on some cryptocurrencies exchanges at the end of May 2021.
The main goal of Mina is to be a leader in privacy and security while solving one of the biggest problems concerning this matter, transactions’ history size, thanks to a lightweight blockchain design. As you may know, for a blockchain to work properly and achieve security, each transaction has to be saved in blocks. When a block is full it is joined with the rest of the blocks, thus creating a blockchain. In the case of Bitcoin, each block has a size of 1 Megabyte, making the total size of the Bitcoin Blockchain roughly 430 Gigabytes as of the 16th of October, 2022—a huge number needed to be downloaded by Bitcoin miners to securely validate transactions. In comparison, the full Mina’s blockchain has a constant size of just 22 kilobytes, or approximately 19500 times less storage needed by a validator to validate any given transaction.
How does Mina achieve such a lightweight while achieving security and privacy?
Zero knowledge proofs is what makes Mina both lightweight and secure, by generating “snapshots” of each new transaction and adding it to the previous “snapshot”, thus maintaining the 22 kb size. Zero knowledge technology is also what makes the blockchain more secure by allowing you to prove something without needing to provide any information to support that proof. I know that it can be really hard to wrap your head around this, but let’s buy a metal detector now.
Imagine that you experienced a gold rush, and decided to look for gold in your backyard. After some research, you hit the jackpot and discover a big boulder of gold weighing 100 kilograms. You are now rich and want to prove to your friends that it is true, but no one can believe you unless you show them this boulder. In the case of Bitcoin, you have to transport this 100-kilogram boulder which represents the full-size transactions’ history and show it to your friends, but in the case of Mina, which uses zero-knowledge proofs, you could just take a snapshot of the boulder and show it to your friends, without risking that someone steals your gold, or in the crypto context the data stored in the blocks. This technology also allows for more validators on a blockchain as they are not limited by their storage capacity, thus preventing the blockchain from becoming centralized, increasing its security.
What are Mina Protocol real-life use cases?
By allowing the blockchain to have no constraints on who can be a validator, Mina solves the centralization problem, which can render some blockchains very easy targets if the number of validators is small, as these can be hacked and the information stolen. The use of zero-knowledge proof also allows for many uses in our daily lives, such as tracking any company’s sensitive data without risking revealing the data or, regarding passports and personal info, helping avoid identity theft.
Mina cryptocurrency and tokenomics
As of December 8, 2022, the Mina crypto price is $0.552 according to CoinGecko, with an annual trading volume of $45.345 billion. The full supply of this cryptocurrency is currently 824 million and is going to increase with people earning block rewards, which is possible through delegating your Mina crypto to help validate transactions thanks to Mina’s proof-of-stake consensus. See it as if you lend your crypto so it can be used to validate new transactions. This helps reduce the selling pressure and maintain the price at a good level.
The market cap, which is the total value of all the tokens in circulation, is valued at $432,707,520 as of December 8, 2022, which is a small market cap relative to all the use cases that this cryptocurrency can offer. In addition to this, Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, is a huge fan of zero-knowledge technologies as he thinks they can help Ethereum scale, something that can positively affect the price action of the Mina coin.
As for the actual process of buying Mina crypto, we’ll point you in the direction of tradecrypto.com, a reliable platform for cryptocurrency coverage and tutorials. In their guide on where to buy Mina Crypto, you’ll find the six best crypto exchanges for buying this coin, as well as explanations on how to buy it, where to store it, and even how to sell it later on. As Mina can indeed be called a good investment, such a guide might just come in handy. a way that these governments can be kept in check is through the ability of blockchain to provide immutable and tamper-proof records.
