Against Mina

Mina is the closest project in ambition, and the comparison is about which axis each design optimises. Mina's headline is a succinct, constant-size chain proof of around 22 kB [S, Mina documentation]. What that figure covers is the chain itself plus, per query, one account and one Merkle path [S]; the achievement sits on the verification and size axis. On the proving side, Mina's history states the trade: proving cost exceeded what block producers could carry themselves, so the protocol includes a marketplace in which specialised operators produce proofs for fees [S, Mina documentation]. Its account model also places state lookups inside the circuit on the critical path of every transition, which is a documented property of that design [S].

Modulus optimises the other axis. The claim set here is prover time, prover memory and ordinary hardware, and the position is that whoever cannot afford to prove is a dependency, so the envelope decides how much intermediation a network needs [A]. No size comparison is made in either direction; the two projects' headline numbers measure different things, and this page keeps them apart deliberately.