Glossary
Mina Protocol
A Layer-1 whose entire chain state is compressed into a constant-size ZK proof — about 22 KB — letting any device verify the chain in milliseconds.
Mina ships the smallest blockchain in production: its consensus is verified by a single recursive ZK-SNARK proof that updates as blocks arrive. Anyone — including a browser — can verify the full chain in milliseconds without downloading history.
Smart contracts ("zkApps") run off-chain and submit proofs of correct execution to be folded into the chain proof. The model is elegant but tooling is still maturing; production use cases skew toward identity, voting, and zkSNARK-friendly applications.