MINA: Solution for Blockchain Trilemma

 MINA: Solution for Blockchain Trilemma 

1. What is Blockchain Trilemma?

Source post: The Blockchain Trilemma

    Blockchain Trilemma is the balance between Decentralization, Security and Scalability. Some partial solutions for this problem are: Consensus Protocol Improvements and Sharding for Layer 1 ; and Nested Blockchains, State Channels and Sidechains for Layer 2. But they could not solve the trilemma in truth.

2. How MINA solve the trilemma with Kimchi?

Source post: Kimchi - The latest update to Mina’s proof system 

First, MINA protocol is a blockchain platform which is truly decentralized and securable based a recursive zk-proof technology. However, producing zk-proof may cost a lot of time, about 10 minutes for a proof. In 10/02/2022, MINA stated that they develop a Mina’s proof system, named Kimchi, which may produce proof much faster. 

Kimchi is based on PLONK, a proof system released in 2019 with 128 citations until 5/5/2022. Since then, many ameliorations and extensions have been proposed. There’s been fflonk, turbo PLONK, ultra PLONK, plonkup, and recently plonky2 (100x faster). It’s hard to follow, but essentially all these protocols implement variants of PLONK. Thus, we call them plonkish protocols. Kimchi is such a plonkish protocol. Today, PLONK is regarded as one of the most ambitious general-purpose zero-knowledge proof constructions. Many projects like Zcash, Polygon Zero (formerly known as Mir Protocol), StarkNet,  Aztec network, Dusk Network, MatterLabs (zksync), Astar, and anoma, have their own implementation of the proof system.