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About SNARK Workers

While most protocols have just one primary group of node operators (often called miners, validators, or block producers), Mina has a second group — the SNARK worker.

SNARK workers are integral to the Mina network's health because these nodes are responsible for snarking, or producing SNARK proofs, of transactions in the network. By producing these proofs, snark workers help maintain the succinctness of the Mina blockchain. A SNARK coordinator can also be used to coordinate work across a pool of SNARK workers.

Read on to learn why SNARK workers are needed, how the economic incentives align, and operational details of performing SNARK work. Feel free to click through to any of the sections that are most relevant to your needs.

Note: The theory of zk-SNARKs is not covered. Deep knowledge of SNARKs is not required to read this section, but it is helpful to understand in general how SNARKs work and what they are useful for. To learn more, check out this What are zk-SNARKs? primer first.

SNARK Workers​

This section describes how to run SNARK coordinators and SNARK workers on the Mina Protocol.