Mina Protocol

This page will give resources and information about Mina Protocol and how/why is it different.

Mina Overview

Mina was used as an unit of weight and money in Ancient Greece. Even though it is not used anymore, we added succinctness, technology and more privacy to build Mina Protocol, its great descendant.

-Yesilyurt, Yasin Berk.

Before showing you the o1js API, i would like to share some resources that will clarify the properties of Mina protocol, as well as its differences from other chains.

To understand Mina, it is nice to start with its consensus mechanism, proof system and what are SNARK workers. You are not required to dive deep to PLONK or Kimchi, since they are some black magic for you if you are not coming from a ZK background.

Phew. That should've been exhausting to read all materials with the materials they also linked in their articles. However, you might've started to understand why Mina defining itself as . Also you had a time to refresh your memories about Zk Circuits and others.

If you are coming from another ecosystem, you might know that there are some objects in those chains that are called Token address or Smart contract address. In Mina protocol, SmartContract class enables a similar property by letting you to create a Public key (ZkApp Key) and a verification key that will be used in SmartContract class. Deploying smart contracts on mina, terminologically, makes it a zero knowledge app, called ZkApp. ZkApp accounts are different than other chains as well, which is explained in the documents.

OPTONAL: Watching the video of Nathan that he explains how Mina actually works would be a very beneficial part.