How does Mina keep an entire blockchain at 22KB?
This is the first piece in a deep dive series on Mina Protocol. The original version of this article is published on Medium — head there for the full piece. The rest of the series, starting with recursive zk-SNARKs, continues here on the blog.
The short version
One characteristic of blockchain technology is decentralization: the network runs on independent nodes rather than a single central authority. Normally, that means every node has to store and verify the entire transaction history to trust the current state — and that history only grows.
Mina takes a different approach. Instead of storing the full chain, a Mina node holds a constant-sized cryptographic proof — historically described as 22KB, though Mina's own updated technical breakdown puts the core figure closer to 11KB, depending on what a given node needs to do with it (a light client verifying state has different requirements than a block producer).
That number stays the same size whether the network is a day old or ten years old. The next article in this series explains the mechanism that makes that possible: recursive zk-SNARKs.