Grin, which is a cryptocurrency that leverages the mimblewimble privacy technology, has just gone live on mainnet. Mimblewimble is a protocol that fuses transactions together, so that they become indecipherable, even on a public ledger. The protocol has a strong pop culture reference and is named after the tongue-tying curse in the Harry Potter book series.
While Grin has been in its developing stage since the later part of 2016, its first block of transactions (after the network’s genesis block) appeared today, at 17:38 UTC, and according to a block explorer, a second block was mined less than a minute later.
A market for the cryptocurrency is already beginning to form, and with over 7,000 followers on Grin’s official Twitter account, there is a sizable community supporting and watching the continued development of this privacy coin, like a hawk, now that it has been officially launched. Though the first block only awards 60 Grin, one investor has already bid 0.1 BTC for 1,000 grin (roughly $0.37 per token) on Bisq, a decentralized exchange listing the token. Another bid on Bitmesh values the token much more highly, offering 10 BTC for 1 grin (though the buy order is for 0.001 Grin). This is meant to spur confidence in the coin as a currency, Yeastplume had revealed back in December, adding that he didn’t want to “unfairly reward early adopters with an arbitrary deflationary halving schedule.”
Grin is a fully donations-based initiative that is “launched fairly, free of [initial coin offering], pre-mine or founder’s reward” which is the second cryptocurrency leveraging the tech to go live on mainnet. The first was an Israel-based startup known as Beam. Grin developer “Yeastplume” in late October emphasized that though the two privacy-focused chains were separate, the projects were not partaking in a competition. As per reports, Beam had even helped in raising funds at one point for Grin development.
Unlike Beam, Grin has an unfixed monetary policy, meaning it issues tokens once every second.
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