Mina is a "lightweight" smart contract platform that aims to become a global payment system. Solve the scalability problem existing in existing blockchains, where the cost of validating the blockchain grows proportionally to the total transaction throughput. In these cases, the cost of running a network node can end up exceeding the resources available to most real-world users.

The goal of Mina is to design a decentralized payment system that can efficiently verify the history of the system from genesis without relying on any external information. This is achieved through the following properties:

• The concept of "succinct blockchain".
• Generic functions are modeled as replicated state machines using incrementally computable SNARKs.
• A concrete implementation of a payment system called Mina.
• Ouroboros Samasika, a provably secure PoS consensus protocol with adaptive security and bootstrapping from genesis.
• The state is scanned in parallel to improve transaction confirmation times beyond the limits imposed by proof construction.
• Perform performance evaluation reports for protocols involving public communities.

Typically, as the blockchain scales, validating data on the blockchain becomes more and more onerous, leading to a centralization of validators. Mina hopes to avoid this limitation by utilizing what the team calls a succinct blockchain, which requires constant time and data to verify the current state of the world (20 KB/10 milliseconds).

Succinct blockchains are implemented by recursive combinations of zk-SNARKs using constant-size proofs computed in arbitrary increments. This means that the complexity of a verification chain is independent of its size, yet users can easily and actively participate in the network. Instead of keeping the entire chain, users simply use SNARKs (Succinct Non-Interactive Arguments of Knowledge) to maintain the current state, proving its existence.

This allows Mina to scale to thousands of transactions per second, and requires orders of magnitude less resources to maintain than PoW blockchains.