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Why is the lightweight blockchain protocol Mina Protocol resistant to 51% attacks?

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The main network of Mina Protocol will be launched soon, which is worthy of attention.

Original title: "Lightweight blockchain protocol Mina Protocol mainnet is about to go online: resistant to 51% attacks"

Original source: Fenbushi Capital

Gauntlet Network is a financial modeling platform for Crypto and DeFi. Most recently, it published an analysis on Mina Protocol that specifically looked at the use of zk-SNARK technology. (Mina Protocol was formerly known as Coda Protocol, this article comes from crypto.briefing, distributed capital translation.)

The company concluded : 51% attack on Mina Protocol is very difficult to profit, because any perpetrator will lose more money due to token devaluation. A 51% attack refers to an attack on a blockchain network in which a group or individual holds more than half of the mining hash rate.

Although the 51% attack is more related to the POW mining mechanism, it is also applicable to the POS consensus algorithm. Gauntlet's research report shows that in fact, attacking Mina Protocol is usually more expensive than attacking ordinary POS protocols. To make the attack more cheap, the attacker needs to be able to carry out the attack when the token price drops by 80%. ”

Mina Protocol uses zk-SNARKs technology, also known as zero-knowledge proof. They use encryption keys to allow one party to show "knowledge" of a value to the other without revealing it.

Evan Shapiro, CEO and co-founder of Mina Protocol, explained: “Research shows that Mina Protocol uses zk-SNARKS Consensus algorithm, which is as resistant to attack as other PoS blockchains, and does not require long-term locking of tokens.”

Thanks to the promotion of Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, zk-SNARKS technology is very famous in the blockchain community, and many other public chains have also adopted this technology. Mina Protocol uses zk-SNARKS to improve scalability, thus helping to reduce the size of the public chain to only 22KB. Other blockchains are much larger: According to Blockchain.com, the Bitcoin public chain is over 324GB in size.

Evan Shapiro said that data-intensive blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum require resources to download large amounts of data, which limits miners' participation, so such public chains can only compromise other performance for security. Again, this limits the degree of decentralization. He also said that Mina Protocol is expected to successfully solve this problem.

“Our goal is to make Mina Protocol both scalable and secure, and to enable block producers to Highly accessible so that developers can easily use it to build verifiable dapps.” By using zk-SNARKS, Mina Protocol can be kept at a manageable size of 22KB: it’s small enough for people to work on mobile devices.

People often discuss the blockchain impossible triangle (scalability, security, and degree of decentralization). Many people believe that the perfect blockchain requires these three elements, which are difficult to achieve to the same degree of success.

Mina Protocol uses a proof-of-stake (PoS) variant called Ouroboros Samasika, which can be chosen prior to validating an epoch block producer. If a validator can accumulate enough stake in the network to perform multiple validations in the upcoming epoch, an attack vector will be opened.

This prevents attackers from forking the public chain after removing pledged tokens. "Mina improves on Ouroboros proof-of-stake to have a clean nature while preventing attackers from trying to fork the public chain," said Shapiro.

Mina blockchain is the most lightweight in the world. More and more chains leverage advanced cryptography like zk-SNARKS to create what is known as "Web3," a decentralized iteration of the internet. Mina is one of them. Blockchains like Mina act as a settlement layer for exchanging value between decentralized applications.

Shapiro finally confirmed: "Mina's mainnet will be launched soon."