- Mina is the architect of the “world’s lightest blockchain,” a proof-of-stake technology.
- Pantera, Brevan Howard, Alan Howard, Amber Group, Blockchain.com, Circle Ventures, and Finality Capital Partners are among the participants.
According to Evan Shapiro of the Mina Foundation, the funds will be used to “open up other award programmes, such as a more extensive grant programme to support developers.”
The protocol for the blockchain FTX Ventures and Singaporean hedge fund Three Arrows Capital led a $92 million fundraising round for Mina.
According to Evan Shapiro, chief executive of Mina Foundation, the funds would be used to “open up more funding programmes” to “help developers.”
“This investment from some of the most well-known names in crypto bolsters our goal of making Mina the go-to privacy and end-to-end security layer for Web3 while being participant-powered,” Shapiro added.
Pantera, Brevan Howard, Alan Howard, Amber Group, Blockchain.com, Circle Ventures, and Finality Capital Partners are among the other investors in the round.
Mina is the designer of the “world’s lightest blockchain,” which is a proof-of-stake technology. The network’s state is kept at a modest 22 kilobits (kb) — roughly 2,800 characters or 10 tweets — thanks to recursive zero-knowledge proofs. In comparison, Bitcoin’s blockchain is now at 396GB, while Ethereum’s whole chain requires 601GB to sync.
Imagine photographing a sunset in Hawaii while on vacation to prove you were there. Someone has now taken a photograph of you. Unlike with snapshot images, however, a cryptographic mechanism known as zk-SNARKS allows the second picture bearer to establish that you were in Hawaii just as well as you could.
Because node operators do not require a substantial investment in hardware, the blockchain’s tiny size theoretically allows Mina to decentralise more readily. Both Ethereum and Bitcoin developers have plans to allow so-called “light clients” to operate without a full copy of the chain history, using similar mechanisms.
On Mina, however, everyone acts as a complete node and contributes to maintaining consensus by using a variant of the Ouroboros proof-of-stake protocol, which was first designed for Cardano.
The concept is based on another network participant known as a “prover” (similar to a Bitcoin miner, but without the energy consumption), who is responsible for storing the entire state.
However, there is a drawback to computing zero-knowledge proofs: Mina’s 1 transaction-per-second (TPS) rate is significantly slower than other layer-1 networks such as Cosmos and Solana, and even slower than the Bitcoin network’s 7 TPS rate.
The team prefers to concentrate on an alternative conceptual model for scalability, which they refer to as ScaDe (Scalability-per-unit-of-Decentralization).
In an interview, Brian Lee, a partner at FTX Ventures, noted that Mina is “designed for broad adoption at both the user and application level,” and that it will “allow a new generation of Web3 applications.”
The blockchain raised $18.7 million in a token sale on CoinList last year.
Disclaimer: These are the writer’s opinions and should not be considered investment advice. Readers should do their own research.
