Hassan Maishera
On Wednesday, the Mina Protocol team announced via X that Mesa, Mina’s next protocol upgrade, is now available on Devnet.
The upgrade brings five significant improvements to the protocol – each designed to unlock greater developer capability, improve network performance, and streamline how future upgrades are carried out.
The Mesa Upgrade encompasses four Mina Improvement Proposals (MIPs) and one upgrade mechanism enhancement:
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Slot Reduction (MIP6)*: Reduces slot time to 90 seconds, increasing transaction throughput and improving the overall user and developer experience.
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Increase On-Chain State Size Limit (MIP7): Expands the number of on-chain state fields from 8 to 32, giving developers more flexibility.
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Event/Action Limit Increase (MIP8): Raises the current limits on events and actions, enabling more expressive applications and reducing the number of transactions end users need to approve.
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Account Update Limit Increase (MIP9): Raises the limit on account updates per zkApp transaction, allowing more complex logic to be executed within a single transaction.
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Hard Fork Automation: Introduces new automation infrastructure for conducting future hard forks, making the upgrade process simpler, less manual, and more efficient.
Mina is a layer-1 protocol with a succinct blockchain. The current blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum store hundreds of gigabytes of data, and their blockchains will only increase in size over time.
Mina Protocol is a minimal “succinct blockchain” built to curtail computational requirements in order to run DApps more efficiently. Mina has been described as the world’s lightest blockchain since its size is designed to remain constant despite growth in usage.
Furthermore, it remains balanced in terms of security and decentralization. The project was rebranded from Coda Protocol to Mina in October 2020.
Mina is similar to Bitcoin, apart from how it handles transactions, but also employs the account model used in Ethereum.
In this respect, the difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum is that the state of the Bitcoin blockchain contains a list of unspent coins, while Ethereum’s state is made up of account balances.
Mina, on the other hand, uses a prover (or snarker, if you will), an equivalent of a miner, to ensure each block commits to the state.
Mina employs the Ouroboros Samasika, a type of PoS mechanism specially designed for succinct decentralized networks since it provides bootstrapping from a genesis block.
Succinct blockchains contain two major functions: verify and update. Verification touches on consensus, blockchain summary, and blocks, while the update function interacts with consensus and chain summary.
MINA is up 9.5% in the last 24 hours, trading at $0.04407 at press time.
