By Naamah (naamah8064 on Discord) The reason I wrote this article is I wanted to test deploying a node on the Berkeley network to test ZkApps. So I went to the Berkeley RC1 release note here : https://github.com/MinaProtocol/mina/releases/tag/2.0.0berkeley_rc1 and start following installation guide. Things didn’t go as expected.

At the core of Mina’s design is the use of recursive zk-SNARKs (Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Arguments of Knowledge), which are a form of cryptographic proof that enables the protocol to maintain a constant-sized blockchain, regardless of the number of transactions processed.