Mina, the world’s lightest blockchain creating a private gateway between the real world and crypto, launches on mainnet today and announces its partnership with CoinList for its upcoming token sale.
San Francisco, CA; March 23, 2021
Mina, the world’s lightest blockchain creating a private gateway between the real world and crypto, launches on mainnet today and announces its partnership with CoinList for its upcoming token sale.
Evan Shapiro, CEO and Co-Founder of o1Labs and Board Member of the Mina Foundation, shared, “Mina aims to empower users through its lightweight blockchain, giving users direct, permissionless access to cryptocurrency, while its zkApps, or SNARK-powered applications bring new possibilities for internet privacy and data security. Between its lightweight design and zkApps, Mina provides a seamless gateway to privately connect the real world with crypto.”
Unlike the majority of blockchains that do not interact with the internet, Mina can interact privately with any website. This allows developers to leverage real world data into computing and decision-making to change the way we live and work, without ever compromising privacy. Specifically, Mina never shares sensitive user data—even to those counterparties requesting it. Instead, Mina proves a fact about the data and shares only that verified proof.
For example, by partnering with decentralized lending protocol Teller Finance, a user would be able to prove that their credit score is above 700 without sharing their actual score, or any other sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) like their social security number, with the requesting party. Mina can simply connect to a credit score reporting website, produce a proof on the user’s local machine (e.g., passing the credit threshold), and then share that proof with the requesting party. Powered by Mina, Teller’s users would never put their PII at risk.
Investors supporting o1Labs, the team that has incubated Mina, include Polychain, Paradigm, Coinbase Ventures, Three Arrows Capital, General Catalyst, Accomplice, Metastable, Naval Ravikant, Bixin Ventures, and others.
Mina is known for:
- Creating the world’s lightest, constant-sized 22kb blockchain—even as it scales
- Empowering every user to operate as a full node and participate in consensus
- Building one of the largest and most active communities of any layer-one protocol launched in the last two years, including 100,000+ social media and community participants, 2,000+ unique Testnet participants, 100+ countries represented, and 15+ language groups
- Onboarding 650+ Genesis Founding members now operating nodes on mainnet and powering robust decentralization
- Distributing over 40 token grants to developers and community members, including DSRV Labs, Figment Networks, Chainsafe, and BitCat
- Earning recognition in Gauntlet‘s research report as one of the most secure Proof-of-Stake blockchains
Whereas legacy blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum grow increasingly heavy, resource-intense and inaccessible with each transaction, the Mina blockchain is light. Thanks to advanced cryptography and recursive zk-SNARKs (an application of zero-knowledge proofs) the entire Mina chain is about 22kb—the size of a couple of tweets. Its size will allow anyone to quickly sync and verify the network, exponentially increasing participation, true decentralization, censorship resistance, and network security.
Now that Mina has launched on mainnet, developers will soon be able to leverage the protocol to create decentralized SNARK-powered applications (zkApps), bringing privacy and data security to users around the globe.
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About Mina Foundation
The Mina Foundation is the non-profit steward of the Mina Protocol, the world’s lightest blockchain. The Foundation supports the protocol by issuing grants to third parties that make significant contributions and by maintaining & managing community assets. Board members include Former Executive Director at ZCash Foundation Josh Cincinnati, Principal of Slow Ventures Jill Carlson, VP of Engineering at Interchain GmbH and Tendermint developer Tess Rinearson, Fund Director and Joint Legal Counsel of International Management Services Sean Inggs, and CEO of o1Labs, the team that incubated Mina, Evan Shapiro.
About Mina
Mina is the world’s lightest blockchain, powered by participants. Rather than apply brute computing force, Mina uses advanced cryptography and recursive zk-SNARKs to design an entire blockchain that is and always will be about 22kb, the size of a couple tweets, ushering in a new era of blockchain accessibility. With its unique privacy features and ability to connect to any website, Mina is building a private gateway between the real world and crypto—and the secure, democratic future we all deserve. Mina is a project of o1Labs, a leader in verifiable computation.
About Mina Protocol
Mina is the world’s lightest blockchain, powered by participants. Rather than apply brute computing force, Mina uses advanced cryptography and recursive zk-SNARKs to design an entire blockchain that is about 22kb, the size of a couple of tweets. It is the first layer-1 to enable efficient implementation and easy programmability of zero knowledge smart contracts (zkApps). With its unique privacy features and ability to connect to any website, Mina is building a private gateway between the real world and crypto—and the secure, democratic future we all deserve.
