Mina Protocol Illuminate: Genesis Summit, 14 Jun 2021

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From YouTube: Mina Overview and Product Roadmap | Illuminate: Genesis Summit

Description

Mina's ecosystem partner, O(1) Labs, goes over a high-level overview of the Mina blockchain and then walks us through a product roadmap and the priorities for 2021.

What is Illuminate?

Illuminate is a free virtual event that took place on March 28th, 2021, and which celebrated Mina’s mainnet launch and exciting protocol milestones.

Participants heard from a range of blockchain experts, industry leaders, and community members about Genesis and the road ahead. The one-day event featured panels and sessions on Mina’s use cases, advancements in zk-SNARKs, Staking-as-a-Service, industry insights and so much more. Illuminate is also a big thank-you to Mina’s vibrant community, who have made incredible contributions to the network over the past two years.

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What is 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 of 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 stewarded by the Mina Foundation, a non-profit organization.

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#blockchain #crypto #cryptocurrency #zksnark #stark #cryptography #roadmap #MinaProtocol

A

Hi everyone hi, uh so I'm here with bijan head of product at one labs, I'm brandon first engineer at of one labs and uh we're going to talk about a high level overview of mina and the product roadmap yeah. So I'm going to go over the the overview first. This is this is quite high level. You'll you'll hear more details throughout the day.

A

So let's just get started mean is a layer one protocol. It must be said uh so here it is, um but we're gonna talk about other things. um Mina is powered by a succinct blockchain. Let's, let's talk a bit about that, uh let's talk about the snarks that make it possible and a bit about recursion.

A

uh Let's talk about the consensus mechanism in in mina and uh and then this unique snarkit place and snark worker role. That's that's unique to me. You know why do we have it? What is it and what problem does it solve? Okay, so succinct, blockchains, uh well, mina's blockchain is less than 22 kilobytes. It's hard to believe this, but it is true.

A

uh We actually published a blog post recently uh called the 22 kilobyte technical reference, and it goes in very, uh very much detail about precisely defining what we mean by blockchain here, how we calculate the number- and you can go there if you want to learn more, um but uh it's there, uh so so that maybe that doesn't tell you much about uh why this is good right. uh So so what? What does this a sickness buy us?

A

Well, it means no matter how many transactions are going through the network, no matter how many blocks have gone through the network. This we we remain at this small size and- and this is true not just for these- like ideal uh super lightweight, 22 kilobyte nodes, but even for the nodes that participate in consensus, it's much quicker to sync and as as the network functions as the network goes on and lives throughout the hopefully many many many years, the amount of data won't scale with the number of transactions or blocks.

A

It will remain constant with respect to those it's awesome now, snarks are what power this this succinctness. So we should talk a little bit about them. I'm sure we'll talk about them a lot today, uh so it's an acronym stands for zero knowledge, succinct, non-interactive, argument of knowledge. As your knowledge we learned about in the last talk, um succinct. Well, you heard in the context of blockchains in the context of these proofs, it means even if the statement itself is quite complex, the proof object and associated data is small and verifying. It is very fast.

A

Non-Interactive means that in a single proof, object handoff, a verifier can can verify that. That proof is true without having to go back and forth with the prover argument. Well, cryptographers will get mad at me by this explanation. But, uh let's just say it's it's a proof with a little bit of non-determinism, just a tiny bit, but for all intents and purposes it means proof. um Then this of knowledge bit, so uh so so this this is interesting.

A

These these statements that their existence proofs they prove that there exists something, but uh the prover actually knows the thing. The prover doesn't just know that it exists somewhere in the world. The prover has it in front of them and they must have it in front of them to make these proofs. So it's a proof of knowledge of that thing. Now. All of this is probably very abstract.

A

uh Let's think about it from another angle: the snarks, let you prove statements of the form there exists some data such that there's predicates that hold on the data so like there exists a pdf file such that it's hash is x or what's interesting with snarks is you can say there exists some other proof such that the proof verifies, and then you have this crazy self-referential concept going on which this also might be hard to understand.

A

But there's this awesome anecdote metaphor story way to explain this that I I think I got from isaac a long time ago. So so the idea here imagine that that you're taking a picture with a polaroid camera. Okay of some doesn't matter what it is, take a picture out, prints a picture and- and we put the picture now in front of the of the scene, then we take a picture of the picture out. Out comes this picture of a picture. We put it in front of us again. Do the same thing.

A

Now we have a picture of a picture of a picture and so on and so on and so on and and if you think about it in in the single photograph sized rectangle, we have evidence that many pictures were taken. Even though this picture is the same size as all the other ones.

A

And if you think about this in the context of snarks in the context of mina's blockchain, uh you can imagine like we have a proof of uh the first block in the blockchain and then we we take a a proof of that proof and the new block and it's the same size as the first proof, and we do the same thing again and again and again and again, and whether it's a thousand blocks or a million blocks.

A

The proof is the same size and and it's these recursive snarks, that that powers mean as the sink blockchain um consensus. Let's talk about consensus, uh mina is proof of stake. That's great! It's green proof of work, electricity. This is the in the zeitgeist these days. um Lots of protocols are proof of stake, though, uh what's unique about me in this proof of stake protocol.

A

Well, let's, let's talk about it at a very high level, but vanessary will talk about it in more detail later, so it's called oraboro, samsica and oraboro samasika is decentralized, inclusive and scalable. Okay, there's no limit on the number of participants.

A

The communication overhead is optimal. I would say the the when you're producing a block. No one knows you even exist until you present the block that you produced, there's no need to sort of coordinate beforehand. It's succinct! It works in this setting where we don't have long-term history, but in that setting it can still resolve short-term forex, long-term forks and make sure the network still maintains consensus and and it's provably secure, even in the context of no slashing no bonding or other harsh penalties that other proof-of-stake protocols.

A

uh Typically have um so that, in turn, just makes it less scary to get started and and more inclusive, all right. Snark workers and the snarky place all right. This is this very strange concept, um and I I want to sort of motivate why we have this system in in mena by running us through a thought: experiment.

A

Okay, so, let's, let's try and build mina protocol from the beginning, um and you know we go and do a bunch of engineering and uh we run into an issue though so we run into this issue where creating proofs for the transactions inside blocks takes a bit of computational effort and we don't want block production to require super computers. So if, if a block producer had to make the snarks for all the transactions in a block when it makes the block, then block production would need super computers.

A

This wouldn't be inclusive, and this would lead to centralization, because many people can't afford these super powerful computers. So we we want this work to be done on commodity hardware, and so uh to do so, rather than having it be done by one actor all at once. We can spread it out over the network and then it'll work. Then we can do this work on computers that all of us can afford. uh That's that's exactly what this marketplace does it.

A

It introduces a marketplace to incentivize performing these proofs of transactions across the network and we need a marketplace because remember in a decentralized network. There's no trust. The best way to coordinate folks is to have a market. Snark at place is the name. It's a it's a portmanteau. It's really fun! Snark marketplace! That's why it's called snarking place. It's just a fun word, okay!

A

So so what this marketplace does is it lets us decouple the the hardware requirements of the block producer from the number of transactions that the block producer is putting inside the blocks, so, whether there's one or a thousand, uh the block producer hardware doesn't have to change and and all that work can be done by the network uh in in parallel. uh So how does this marketplace work?

A

uh Well, you can you can look at the economic white paper uh for mina to see like a really nice diagram and more detail, but I'm just gonna cover it at a pretty high rough level, uh so block producers um they buy snarks for older transactions that block producers have queued up in order to add new transactions that the block producer earns fees from uh to this fixed queue or buffer, or you can imagine like a shelf of a fixed size.

A

This shelf is full and I want to put transactions in that shelf so that I can earn transaction fees. But to do so, I have to take things off the shelf, so the block producer they put transactions on the shelf earn the fees they do not create proofs for those transactions in this block the other nodes in the network. They gasp around the blocks, and so everyone can see this new shelf of work or the new portion of the shelf. That's been replaced and snark workers probably running on commodity hardware.

A

A single snark worker can't do all the work at once, um but they they take some of it off the shelf. They crunch some numbers create a snark proof. They embed their public key and a fee inside the proof using a signature of knowledge and what this does is it makes this proof that this fee and public key it's baked in in such a way that if you try and tamper with it, you break the whole proof.

A

So so the only way to compete is to make a snark for cheaper and then the loop closes the the the block producer.

A

They they buy the snarks from these snark workers and if there's more than one available, they take the cheapest one uh because they want to earn the most tokens and uh and the cycle repeats and the network runs and uh and that's how it works. So uh that's mina, there's the overview um we talked about. How mean is a layer, one protocol. It has a succinct, blockchain, it's less than 22 kilobytes in size. It's powered by zk snarks, including these interesting self-referential, recursive use cases of them.

A

There's a proof-of-stake consensus protocol called auroboro samasika, it's decentralized, inclusive and scalable, and mena introduces snark workers in this marketplace in order to keep the network inclusive and not require super computers on our block producers. So I'm going to hand it off to bajan now and and he's going to talk about the roadmap.

B

Hi everyone, I'm bijan head of product.onelabs, very excited to be here. Thank you all for taking time from your sunday to be here. We really appreciate it, and the month of march has really been exciting for us, because we're at a really interesting point in the history of mena I'll go over that in a little bit more detail, I'll talk about the product strategy.

B

um What we think should be our focus right now. Some of the principles that help us make sure that we're moving in the right direction at all times the product roadmap and finally, on what the 2021 priorities look like for us.

B

So um the road to mainnet has actually been a pretty long one and the reason for that is, we started with solving the hard problem of having a fixed size blockchain using recursive snarks. As you can see, we've done uh multiple test nets. Our last test net on test world, which was the adversarial test that got completed in um just a couple months ago, and now we're in mainnet on transactions, are happening enabled by recursive snarks, uh creating a 22 kilobyte blockchain, uh and this kind of allows us to really think about the product strategy.

B

At a long when we zoom out um and think about where we want to go in the long run and the way we've been thinking about it is that we wanted to do the hard fork at for hard work. At first, um it set up the foundation for scalable decentralization, uh the type of blockchain that scales without increasing the size of the blockchain. That allows for as many number of nodes get connected to it if possible.

B

That allows for on any type of device to connect to the blockchain without having to trust another third party and now we're in this point of transitioning, into the second phase of on the our strategy, which is unlocking um the use cases of mina. That we think are unique to the mina protocol. And we think that by enabling the developers to build um applications um and tools.

B

On top of me now we're able to really bring that on to a large scale of users out there and we're in this phase right now we're kind of getting into the phase two. um This is going to require us to work closely with the developers.

B

I'll talk a little bit more about that, and then um once we have an idea of what are some of the use cases that are emerging and what are some of the needs that we're noticing need a lot of attention, we're at a really good point to start thinking about scaling, rather than kind of taking the other way approach that we've seen some of the other projects take, which is, they start with scaling, and um they don't have a lot of basically use cases or a lot of traction on their on protocol.

B

So our approach here is really to try to um kind of follow the use cases and really um try to scale the protocol and tooling and everything else that goes with it, based on those use cases.

B

So, um in terms of priorities for us what that means for us right now is our focus is really driving meaningful usage of mina and evan talked briefly on the about this on the keynote and emre will discuss this in more detail, but this is really through on the usage of this concept of snaps, which is snarkified dapps and that allow on the users to verify some sort of a private computation.

B

That's happened off chain without having to trust any third party, and this is something that's pretty unique to the amino protocol that we think has a lot of meaningful use cases um and that's going to be really our focus in the in the month and years to come um until we feel that um there's like right amount of on usage and demand that space and in order for us to make sure that we're moving in that direction, we're staying focused.

B

um We want to um share a few principles that we want to um follow and hold ourselves accountable for, um and I think it's it's worth mentioning here uh with the broader community and the first one is.

B

We must make promises that we can keep, and what this means is that, instead of um taking this approach, that um a lot of projects and crypto have traditionally taken uh by coming up with you know five year old maps or ten year, road maps or even twenty year, road maps, uh we're gonna, make very clearly defined on promises on with immediate milestones that are measurable, that the community can say whether or not uh we've been able to achieve them.

B

Whether or not we're moving the right direction, and they also allow us to iterate based on your information coming in. They allow us to make sure that um if we see um some sort of a you know traction one particular part of the ecosystem that needs immediate attention. We're able to cater to that, and this um approach of focusing on clearly defined immediate milestones, makes us more nimble and more lean and, at the same time, ensures that we're moving in the in a direction that the community can measure and confirm that it's the right direction.

B

That makes sense with the broader community, and one of the benefits of that is. It allows us to to implement the second principle um of you know and that's really following the ecosystem, focusing on the meaningful pain points and that we notice exists in the community, whether it's coming from the developer community needing more tooling or it's the node operators needing more stability. More throughput or you know better.

B

You know, tooling, that helps them run better node operations or it's the users that are really using mina through some snap applications that are connected to their let's say phone or browsers, and in order for us to deliver that in order for us to really follow the ecosystem and meet address the needs that we notice and need immediate attention. uh We need community involvement and I think um the community of mina is one of the um very strong benefits of our protocol. We have a very strong community that is highly engaged.

B

You can check out our discord, channel and kind of see that for yourself and that allows us to really think about unlocking that potential by engaging involving the community in protocol development and building tooling, that enables a broader developer community to build things.

B

On top of me now and also enabling to him to build snaps on that can be used by the broader audiences me now, so this is going to be another one of key principles of me for us, because we think that by unlocking the potential of the community we're able to increase our product velocity significantly when it comes to product development.

B

Now um what does that mean for us in terms of roadmap? On you know, like I mentioned earlier, we're at this interesting phase, where uh we recently launched mainnet um we've come up with the uh succinct blockchain. um We have a genesis program uh made up of hundreds of uh genesis founding members that are bringing security and stability to the network and they participate in block production.

B

uh Transfers are enabled from the beginning and that's great, because people can actually use the um network and they can see how it actually operates, and now we're moving shifting into phase two which needs us to work closely on with the developers. It needs us to build a lot more tooling for the developer community. It needs us to um build some interesting capabilities, such as composable snaps, which brandon mentioned briefly in his slides.

B

It allows to uh it allows some interesting use cases that have not existed up until now, and the snap developer program is also one of those projects that we're very excited about. We think it's going to enable the snap developers to build more interesting applications. On top of me now, in collaboration with other members of the community and.

A

Mean of phase three is really when.

B

We start scaling around those use cases and those things that we think are significantly important um and one of those one of the important parts of vena phase 3 is enabling the mobile and web full nodes. We know that the communities are very excited about this, and this is really when we're able to bring mina to the average users with any phone device. With any browser uh to take advantage of me now and I finally unchained protocol treasury, that's going to be something that's going to be relevant to us in phase 3..

B

um What that means for us in terms of priorities.

A

B

That for 2021 uh we're going to be focusing on the developer community, like I mentioned briefly earlier- and this is something that hopefully, a community can hold us accountable for, but in the year and see if we've moved in the right direction. We think that supporting the ros implementation is very important. um It helps us to also bring the concept of web and mobile full nodes into reality um with the rust implementation.

B

um Snaps is something that's been in the work for a while and, as evan mentioned earlier, um our partnership with teller funds finance is the first step towards that. But snap's going to be one of the key areas of focus for us in 2021 um and basically enabling more uh demos and actually more on real usage of snaps and net 2021 is going to be important for us and in order for us to do that, we need a lot more tooling.

B

We have a lot of interesting tools and that have emerged over the last few months. We're very excited about them. um There are tools that help the node operators perform better. um There are tools that help any any node operator to know how the network is doing or on their. You know, block explorers that are out there.

B

There are multiple wallets that are being built right now, which is great, um but we think that with snaps coming to reality, um tooling becomes more important and we really need to think about that and make sure that user experience for our developer community is great and, um as more developers come into the ecosystem, it becomes more and more important for us to think about things such as network performance improvements um increasing basically, some of the key improving the some of the key metrics that we think matter to the ecosystem.

B

At that particular point in time and improving the hardware requirements, I think that's going to be one of those things. That's going to be important for us. um We have a pretty good idea of what we need to do there to make the network even more inclusive than it is now, so that more block producers can connect with less hardware requirements. It's going to be something that's going to be excited exciting for a lot of the block producers, and this is something that we're going to be focusing on in 2021.

B

um That is our presentation. uh Thank you very much for joining us, we're very excited about um where we are uh with meena protocol. I think the month of march was um a key milestone for the crypto community as a whole, and we've been able to um bring a fixed size blockchain.

B

That might have sounded like a crazy idea uh just a few years ago um to the market, and I think now our focus is going to be really uh working with the developer community and the broader amina community to um scale the ecosystem and we're looking forward to working with all of you on to have a healthy collaborative relationship um that is going to help us grow as an ecosystem.

A

Yeah, I I can't add anything to that. That was fantastic. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. What is the difference? It's something around this. uh What is the difference between auroboros consensus protocol used in mina compared to ada or cardano, specifically in real world use, performance and flexibility will mean accelerate faster adoption than what is already in the market right now? Well, I don't know about the latter one.

A

That's a very. You need to predict the future to say that, but I can can comment on the differences in the consensus protocols, so um oraboro same asica. I mentioned this, uh maybe maybe too too quickly, but um well in oroboros genesis, which uh I believe is the latest version of oroboros, though they they keep iterating, um but even in in any of uh cardano's aidas or boris's um uh iohk.

A

Whoever whoever owns those um there there's uh the long fork rule requires access to history, so um you actually have to in in their oroboros, uh have exactly when were blocks produced from the point of the fork, even if that's sort of months months ago and on on meena, um we were able to well with orbor simasika. We were able to take that rule and get it to work in this succinct con context.

A

um So that's that's like the main difference, uh and then also, I guess in in practicality in the implementation um is also it's not just implemented on, like the turing machine computer, but also in the snark circuit, uh which is quite uh it's quite interesting. If you want to dig into the code, it's all open source um yeah uh in terms of real world usage, uh we'll we'll see what happens in the real world uh as as mena grows. So hopefully that's.

B

All right I can, I can try to pick one here. um I think the question is: how much snake do you does a block producer need to be sustainable? Is it 66, 000 mina? To be honest, the answer.

A

B

You can have as many tokens to start a block production note and because um the um your portion of your likelihood of winning is going to be a kind of relevant to what what percentage of staking you represent in the network. um That kind of takes care of itself. um You can really start with a small amount, doesn't have to be 66 000 and the rest of it yeah it's up to you.

B

It's really dependent on what sort of hardware you have and how much it's costing you and you know you can kind of do the math, based on the likelihood of you winning and knowing what the reward amount is going to be. I think we're right at time. Thank you so much everyone we're very excited about. What's ahead of us and looking forward to seeing the rest of.

B