Pickles

Pickles is Mina’s inductive zk-SNARK composition system. It lets you construct proofs with zk-SNARKs and combine them in flexible ways to deliver incremental verifiable computation.

Pickles uses a pair of amicable curves called Pasta in order to deliver incremental verifiable computation efficiently.

These curves are referred to as “tick” and “tock” within the Mina source code.

• Tick - Vesta (a.k.a. Step), constraint domain size $2^{18}$ (block and transaction proofs)
• Tock - Pallas (a.k.a. Wrap), constraint domain size $2^{17}$ (signatures)

The Tock prover does less (only performs recursive verifications and no other logic), so it requires fewer constraints and has a smaller domain size. Internally Pickles refers to Tick and Tock as Step and Wrap, respectively.

Tock is used to prove the verification of a Tick proof and outputs a Tick proof. Tick is used to prove the verification of a Tock proof and outputs a Tock proof. In other words,

• ${\mathtt{Prove}}_{tock}(\mathtt{Verify}(Tick))=Tic{k}_{proof}$
• ${\mathtt{Prove}}_{tick}(\mathtt{Verify}(Tock))=Toc{k}_{proof}$

Both Tick and Tock can verify at most 2 proofs of the opposite kind, though, theoretically more is possible.

Currently, in Mina we have the following situation.

• Every Tock always wraps 1 Tick proof, such as
• Tick proofs can verify 2 Tock proofs
  • Blockchain SNARK takes previous blockchain SNARK proof and a transaction proof
  • Verifying two Tock transaction proofs