Elevating Cardano’s Performance: A Beginner’s Guide to Mithril

A Leap Forward for Cardano: What exactly is Mithril, and why is it making waves in the Cardano community?

At its core, Mithril is a protocol designed to help scale the Cardano network. It provides a lightweight, efficient, and secure way for users and applications to access all or parts of the state of the chain without needing access to the full current state. Something extremely usefull for building safe and fast applications and wallets.

Some context on why Mithrill is needed

In the Blockchain industry we believe in true decentralization, meaning that every user should be able to individually verify that each transaction you send or receive is in fact true. For doing that, you need to have the entire state of the Blockchain downloaded into your device, oftenly resulting in Hundreths or thousands of gigabytes of data being downloaded just to verify data. Something that 99.9% of the users dont really wanna do, so how can we make the whole process seemless, so wallet builders can integrate that into their apps, this way having easy to use wallets, with no need of storing tons of data on your device? well thats where light wallets are born. Light wallets, designed for their simplicity and ease of use, have become increasingly popular among cryptocurrency users. But they come with a significant trade-off: decentralization.

Most light wallets rely on centralized authorities or need to connect to a full node to verify the blockchain's state. This reliance introduces a potential point of failure and inefficiency, as users have to trust these third-party services or bear the brunt of connecting to a full node, which can be resource-intensive and slower. So a solution must be found if we wanna have the best out of both worlds, both speed, security and decentralization.

Mithril addresses this dilemma head-on by providing a mechanism for light wallets and applications to securely and efficiently verify the blockchain's state without compromising decentralization.

How Mithril Works

Mithril marks a transformative shift in the operational mechanics of the Cardano blockchain, steering away from the previous necessity for Applications to run full nodes and individually validate each transaction within the blockchain’s extensive history. This process ensured a high level of security and integrity but was accompanied by notable drawbacks, including substantial demands on resources and extended synchronization times, potentially hindering accessibility and user experience. Mithril introduces a more efficient and user-friendly approach, wherein Stake Pool Operators (SPOs) run lightweight Mithril signers to generate stake-based signatures. These signatures represent their proportional stake in the network, creating a decentralized and secure environment that reduces the risk of centralization while ensuring network integrity.

To keep things simple, think of Mithril as a turbocharger for the Cardano network. It operates alongside the main blockchain, run by SPOs, and produces stake-based snapshots of the blockchain. Why would you need snapshots? So applications constantly know the status of the blockchain, the faster they can do this, the faster the application runs. So with Mithril, SPOs constantly create snapshots of the blockchain and sends them to an Aggregator, which is basically a node that gathers all these snapshots and creartes a certificate, that validates the status of the network. These aggregators then compile and distribute certified snapshots of the blockchain’s state, which can be downloaded and verified by Mithril clients. Enabling quick and secure access to the Cardano network’s state.

The impact of this is significant. For instance, the time to bootstrap a Cardano node has been reduced to under 20 minutes on a consumer-grade laptop, a process that used to take several hours in the past. Personally I´ve once spent 12 hours to open up a node on my notebook.

Applications and Use Cases

Mithril is not just a theoretical improvement; it has practical applications that can revolutionize how we interact with the Cardano blockchain. Some of the most notable use cases include:

1. Light Wallets: Wallets that don’t require additional trust assumptions.
2. Fast Bootstrapping of Full Nodes: Drastically reducing the time it takes to set up a full Cardano node.
3. Efficient Voting Systems: Enhancing the security and efficiency of blockchain-based voting systems.

You can find out more about Mithril's mainnet launch & roadmap here.

Where we at with Mithril

Since its deployment, Mithril signers have been adopted by about 80 Stake Pool Operators (SPOs), representing over 1.5 billion ADA in stake. This rapid adoption is a testament to the community’s belief in Mithril’s potential.

Mithril represents a significant step forward in Cardano’s ongoing journey to create a more scalable, efficient, and user-friendly blockchain. By providing a lightweight and secure means of accessing the blockchain’s state, Mithril opens up new possibilities for applications and services within the Cardano ecosystem, all while ensuring the network remains robust and efficient.

Whether you’re a crypto enthusiast, a stake pool operator, or just someone curious about the future of blockchain technology, Mithril is a development worth paying attention to. As the Cardano community continues to innovate and push the boundaries of what’s possible, protocols like Mithril demonstrate that the future of blockchain is not just about transactions—it’s about creating a seamless, efficient, and secure experience for everyone.