Mina Protocol: A Technical Overview

Mina was founded in 2017 by founders Evan Shapiro and Izaak Meckler. The most unique feature about the Mina protocol is that it boasts a blockchain size of only 22 kilobytes, making it one of the lightest blockchains that exist in the market today.

Mina does not have smart contract capabilities on its main net, but it is currently being developed. According to Mina's documentation, the smart contracts would be written in Typescript, which makes it hard for Mina to leverage the existing blockchain infrastructure and necessitate expending additional resources to build one from scratch. This makes onboarding for both developers and users difficult as a unique set of tooling is required to build applications, use and aggregate on-chain data, all of which are necessary to establish a robust ecosystem.