Minima 迷你马

The WeAreDePIN interview program recently interviewed Minima co-founder and CTO Paddy in July, focusing on the Minima blockchain project and elaborating on its true decentralized concept and technical implementation. Paddy pointed out that many existing blockchain systems have serious tendencies toward centralization, leading to security risks and concentration of control. Minima is committed to ensuring network decentralization and equal participation for every user through innovative design, particularly emphasizing that Minima can run on mobile and other edge devices, achieving lightweight full nodes while ensuring the protocol is non-upgradable and quantum secure. Minima adopts a cooperative mining model, abandoning traditional competitive mining incentives, reducing reliance on super-large computing power, and preventing attackers from controlling the chain. Through structures like the MMR hash tree, Minima achieves efficient storage that is independent of data scale and network scale. In addition, Minima is aimed at the future embedding of large-scale IoT devices, supporting value transfer between devices and the potential for decentralized AI computing, collaborating with major companies like Arm and Siemens to promote ecological construction. Products like MinidApp and Integritas demonstrate a truly decentralized application architecture and reliable data verification without centralized servers. Overall, Minima seeks to create a blockchain ecosystem that does not require trust, resists centralization pressures, and can scale across hundreds of millions of edge devices through technological and conceptual innovation.

Minima Progress Report - December 2025 Minima has achieved a milestone that has been discussed in the blockchain industry for over a decade but has never been truly realized: a fully functional Layer-1 blockchain node, running directly on embedded hardware without relying on cloud infrastructure, heavyweight runtimes, or dedicated servers. Today, Minima runs on an Arm processor subsystem inside an FPGA board, equipped with a custom cryptographic accelerator. Minima's deterministic architecture, combined with specially written C++ code, makes it the first blockchain designed specifically for operation within autonomous machines, rather than merely coexisting with them. This is not a conceptual or speculative roadmap, but a reality that has already been realized. Minima-on-Chip marks the beginning of a new field where decentralization is no longer provided as a cloud service but becomes an inherent property of hardware, powering drones, robots, vehicles, industrial controllers, and IoT devices. Machines thereby gain built-in trust, verifiable behavior, and native coordination capabilities. Meanwhile, the Minima network gains a scalable, real-world source of continuous transaction flow and economic activity, with these transactions and activities generated directly by the autonomous devices themselves. A public flight demonstration of Minima running on autonomous drones is scheduled for late January 2026. From concept to actual chip, the blockchain project has evolved from conceptual phase to design phase, ultimately achieving actual operation on hardware. C++ Client for Embedded Systems Minima has been completely restructured from Java to C++, eliminating JVM overhead and supporting direct compilation to Arm, RISC-V, and microcontroller-level devices. This architectural shift has preliminarily achieved a five-fold reduction in memory usage, a critical threshold allowing Minima to run in embedded and resource-constrained environments where traditional blockchain clients cannot operate. For many low-power systems, this reduction alone is sufficient to determine their feasibility. Running Minima on Arm SoC-FPGA Platform Minima is now operational on the Arm processor subsystem inside FPGA development boards. This is the same type of architecture widely adopted in aerospace, automotive, defense, robotics, and industrial automation systems. Integrated into Autonomous Drones The Arm-FPGA platform has been integrated into autonomous drones, with the on-chip Minima node receiving and processing real-time sensor and system status data. Drones do not need to transmit data streams to external services for verification but instead use Minima running on their own internal hardware to locally hash and record their behavior. This enables the system to generate tamper-proof, verifiable flight behavior logs in real time. Hardware Accelerators in Peripheral Chips A dedicated cryptographic accelerator has been implemented in the FPGA architecture and connected to the Arm runtime via high-bandwidth DMA. These accelerators include quantum-safe SHA-3 hash cores, 256-bit arithmetic units, high-precision fixed-point decimal modules, and prototype mining accelerators. Together, these components demonstrate that Minima can operate as a full node on the same hardware that powers true autonomous systems while pushing compute-intensive operations directly into hardware for speed and efficiency. Edge Hardware Accelerates Trust The project's hardware focus is straightforward and clear: run the blockchain at silicon chip speed. By offloading cryptographic workloads to dedicated FPGA logic, Minima achieves performance and efficiency levels unattainable by pure software execution. The SHA-3 accelerator alone achieves a hash rate approximately 100 times greater than CPU-based hashing. This has several important implications. First, it significantly reduces CPU load. For low CPU and low power devices, offloading hashing and arithmetic operations to silicon chips allows processors to focus on real-time control tasks such as flight stabilization, sensor fusion, or robotic decision-making. This CPU offload is one of Minima's key advantages in chip-level operation. Second, it improves power efficiency. Hardware acceleration allows for more cryptographic work to be executed per watt of power, which is critical for battery-powered and thermally constrained systems. Third, it enhances network security. The security of the Minima network is proportional to the total computational power contributed by participating nodes. By enabling hardware-accelerated hashing on embedded devices, Minima increases the effective hash rate of the network without a corresponding increase in energy consumption. This hybrid model—performing control on Arm CPUs while executing heavy computations on FPGA chips—is precisely how today's high-performance autonomous systems are engineered. Introducing blockchain into this model achieves unprecedented edge computing capabilities: embedding real-time, hardware-accelerated trust mechanisms directly into machines. Drones, robots, vehicles, or industrial controllers can: locally verify their own data and operations, maintain verifiable, tamper-proof logs in real time, use a blockchain with control logic located on the same chip to coordinate with other machines. Future Outlook Minima-on-Chip is no longer a research concept. It is currently operational on Arm technology, equipped with verified chip accelerators and a C++ client optimized for embedded autonomous systems. Next steps include: a public demonstration of autonomous drones in late January 2026, further enhancing the security of the cross-architecture C++ client, iterating silicon accelerators based on real benchmark data, and collaborating with partners in the fields of drones, robotics, automotive, and industrial IoT.