Mina Protocol (MINA)

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Historical price evolution of Mina Protocol

Daily historical data. Updated automatically.

Mina Protocol was born in 2017 when Evan Shapiro, an engineer trained at Carnegie Mellon and former Mozilla employee, and Izaak Meckler, a mathematician formerly at Jane Street and PhD candidate in cryptography at UC Berkeley, founded O(1) Labs in San Francisco. Their objective was to research how to solve the growing centralisation of blockchains. The name O(1) refers to Big-O notation for constant complexity, indicating that verification time does not grow with data size. Initially, the project was called Coda Protocol.

The company began raising capital in May 2018 with a seed round of $3.5 million, followed by a Series A of $15 million in April 2019. However, in October of that same year, R3, developer of the Corda blockchain, sued O(1) Labs over the Coda Protocol name, alleging brand confusion. To resolve this dispute, the project was rebranded as Mina Protocol in September 2020, the same month in which the economic whitepaper was also published in October.

On 23rd March 2021, Mina's mainnet was launched, allowing the community to verify the complete state of the network from any device thanks to recursive zk-SNARKs. A month later, the Mina Foundation conducted a community token sale that raised $18.75 million. In August 2021, Evan Shapiro transitioned from CEO of O(1) Labs to CEO of the Mina Foundation.

In March 2022, the Mina ecosystem raised $92 million in a round led by FTX Ventures and Three Arrows Capital, with participation from Brevan Howard, Amber Group, Circle Ventures and Pantera. However, the collapse of Terra-LUNA and FTX during 2022 brought down the two main investors of this round, causing MINA to fall below $0.50 at the end of the year. Despite the bear market, O(1) Labs maintained the pace of weekly commits on GitHub.

During 2023, MINA traded at lows of approximately $0.30 in summer. The Mina Foundation distributed more than $55 million accumulated in grants to protocol developers and launched zkIgnite, a support programme for ecosystem builders. In June 2024, the zkApps smart contracts layer was launched on mainnet, making Mina the first L1 with Turing-complete zero-knowledge smart contracts in production. The Kimchi proof system and the o1js library (formerly SnarkyJS) became available for developers.

On 29th November 2025, Mesa Testnet was launched, the testing environment for the next major update that reduces block time and increases on-chain state limits for zkApps. The community unanimously approved the 4 improvement proposals via on-chain vote. In 2026, MINA's market capitalisation experienced a significant drop from $1,730 million in December 2024 to approximately $64 million in March 2026. The team was reduced from more than 150 to fewer than 60 people, whilst Mesa Upgrade remains pending deployment on mainnet.

Mina Protocol is a layer 1 blockchain that maintains a constant size of approximately 22 KB regardless of the number of transactions processed in its history. This distinctive characteristic is achieved through the use of recursive zk-SNARKs, a cryptographic technology that enables the continuous generation of a compact proof that certifies the validity of the blockchain's current state without requiring storage of the complete block history. Each new block includes a proof that simultaneously verifies the transactions of the current block and the validity of all previous blocks, allowing any participant to verify the entire chain by downloading only a few hundred bytes. This architecture makes it possible to operate a full node from devices with limited resources, such as smartphones.

The protocol uses Ouroboros Samasika as its consensus mechanism, a Proof of Stake variant developed specifically for Mina that enables unlimited node participation without hardware restrictions. Block producers compete to create new blocks and select the necessary SNARK proofs from the Snarketplace, a decentralised marketplace where specialised operators called "snarkers" offer cryptographic proofs of previous transactions in exchange for fees. Smart contracts in Mina are called zkApps and are programmed in TypeScript using the o1js library. The execution of these contracts occurs off-chain in the user's browser, whilst only the resulting cryptographic proof is published on-chain with a fixed fee that does not depend on the size of the computation performed, thus preserving user privacy by revealing only the verified result without exposing the input data.

Data verified against external sources. Some values may have changed since the last update.