MINA Protocol is another crypto that, in my opinion, is just flushing money down the toilet and is on its way to zero. After reviewing thousands of different cryptos over the last 10 years, I see nothing special here. I see no transparency with the team. And I'm tired of people getting ripped off in these coins when I could take 10 minutes to tell you why I don't like it at all. So here we go.
Start with the price chart
If you want to take a look at Mina, you can start on the price chart. First off, it's down 94% since it launched during the last bull run. Most altcoins have their best performance in their first bull run, and people hate buying red charts like this. Even on the best technology and team, like Internet Computer Protocol, having that down chart has kept a lot of people away from it. So the down price chart is very much a bad starting point.
It's only up 60% from its all-time low. In the last year it has had some up and down. But we've got to look at what this really is, because just looking at a price chart does very little. It's a decent starting point, but it's only a starting point.
What Mina actually is: a tiny blockchain
If you look at what Mina Protocol is, it's billing itself as this tiny blockchain. The blockchain is only 22 kilobytes, which is very small. There are other blockchains, like Bitcoin, that are hundreds of gigabytes, and Internet Computer is terabytes now.
But the question you've got to ask is: where is the future? Is the future going toward little tiny blockchains, or is the future going toward having everything on chain? To me, the future is going toward having everything on chain. With memory getting cheaper and processing getting cheaper, a tiny blockchain is not something we really need collectively. And therefore, to me, this offers no value to the world. We don't need some super tiny blockchain.
And even if we did, look at the market cap. The market cap on this is $600 million right now. Internet Computer is around 10 times the market cap of this, and yet it has the best tech in crypto. If you want to see why I keep coming back to that comparison, I lay it out in more detail in my piece on why 100 ICP is enough and 10,000 Internet Computer Protocol is god.
The GitHub commits don't add up
Speaking of comparing Internet Computer Protocol, one of the most positive metrics for Mina looks like the amount of GitHub commits. But again, Internet Computer has twice as many, and its tech is by far the best in crypto.
Mina, at this point, has so many GitHub commits that it starts to leave me wondering if they're intentionally exploiting that just to get attention, because the blockchain is only 22 kilobytes. What are they doing with all these commits? On a 22-kilobyte chain, that volume of activity in the repository just doesn't line up with what the chain actually does.
Look at the actual on-chain activity
When you look at the actual activity on the blockchain, there's very little actually happening. On the Mina Explorer, you'll see a block, then nine minutes between blocks here, three minutes between these blocks, 11 minutes between blocks there. There are very few transactions on the blockchain itself. I'm not seeing that there's hardly any activity, and that's a problem. It doesn't look like there's very much actually happening, and that's after four years.
I personally don't want to invest where things are not bigger than they were in the last bull run. With Internet Computer, the actual amount of raw computation power the network has done has tripled on average every year. Mina is not showing that kind of tripling and fantastic growth. This is the kind of momentum I want to see before I'd ever put money to work, and it's the same lens I bring in my Money playlist.
No transparency on the team
Another huge problem with this is the Mina Foundation website. It looks like a website that's cheaper than mine, which is a problem for a $600 million market cap crypto. There is literally not one single person on the Mina Foundation website. Not one single person I can find on minaprotocol.com who's actually working on this.
Perhaps in a blog or somewhere smaller you'll find a name. Their recent blog says they welcome someone as general counsel. Well, why? When I go to the Mina Foundation website, there's not one single person listed who's actually working on this. Where are the engineers making this protocol better? Where are all the people upgrading this and putting in all these GitHub commits?
On Internet Computer, I can see there are hundreds of people. There are hundreds of engineers. They crank out videos like crazy, and you can see a bunch of the people who are actually working on the blockchain. So why does Mina not have one person on here? Why do people invest in something when they can't see one single member of the team? That's the kind of question I keep coming back to whenever I dig into a coin with my Jerry Banfield Family.
Why I think MINA is a ghost chain
I don't see any reason to invest in this over Internet Computer, or even over Bitcoin. I'd bet Bitcoin will outperform this in the next bull market. And Mina is listed on a bunch of major exchanges already, so it's already out there and you can buy it everywhere.
Most of the tokens do appear to have come unlocked already. But what does that matter if it's just a ghost chain where almost nothing is happening? The total transactions all-time on this are about 6 million. The total accounts are 239,000. There are 10 times that many accounts on Internet Computer Protocol, which has been out much less time. And you don't need to make multiple addresses to use Internet Computer; that's not even counting addresses, that's internet identities, which can each create a whole bunch of addresses.
So when I look at this, there's so little happening on here. There's no transparency on the team. The GitHub looks like it's quite possibly artificially inflated. In my opinion, this is going to go to zero. I'm 99% confident, as my own personal view and not financial advice, that this will not work out well as an investment in crypto. That's why, when I looked at this, I thought there's no way I'm putting my money into that.
I reviewed Mina because people kept asking me to look at it and tell them what I think. If you've been burned by a coin that looked a lot like this, I went through the same pattern in my Berachain review and in my Enjin Coin review, where the same warning signs kept showing up. None of this is financial advice; it's just my honest experience after a decade of looking at these projects.