Grin Cryptocurrency Mainnet Is Live

One of the most highly anticipated cryptocurrency launch events is now officially successful. Grin, an privacy-focused cryptocurrency with an anonymous development team had its first ever block mined on 17:38 UTC on Tuesday.

In the works since 2016, after the high praise for Tom Elvis Jedusor’s MimbleWimble proposal, Grin is a highly-scaleable, privacy focused cryptocurrency leveraging cutting edge cypherpunk technology.

Grin is the second mimblewimble coin to launch – after less than two weeks ago, their biggest competitor – Beam – marked its successful mainnet launch.

Both cryptocurrencies leverage mimblewimble to provide significantly reduced memory requirements for full nodes, state-of-the-art privacy features, allowing miners and nodes to verify transactions without ever knowing the transaction amounts, alongside CoinJoin for even more enhanced security. For more details on the benefits of using mimblewimble, compared to traditional blockchains, you can check the Fungibility and Scaling sections of our Beam launch announcement.

As for Grin, it appears to be the fan-favourite between the MW coins – mostly due to the fact that it is community-funded, with no company behind it, no taxation on the proof of work done by miners and a commitment to remain ASIC-resistant for as long as possible.

However, a common criticism of Grin is its economics – blocks rewards are set to 60 coins per minute, with no evident intention to decrease the inflation rate for the future.

Immediately after launch, a number of mining pools has become available, the two biggest ones being Grin Pool and Grinmint. If you are familiar with your hardware’s mining capabilities for the Cuckatoo31+ and the Cuckaroo29 algorithms, then a newly-launched mining calculator can also help you consider whether mining can be lucrative for you.

Given the current prices seen on Bisq, mining seems to be unprofitable for most of the participants, who appear to be mostly involved for the sake of securing the network of an exciting new cryptocurrency. However, the opportunity to be part of an exciting innovation from day 1 combined with the hope a future price increase were enough to provide the coin with a high network hashrate and strong levels of network security from the beginning.

And while due to the fact that mining rewards will remain stable for years to come, it is unlikely that we will ever see Grin ranked high up the market cap charts. However, with proper community effort, its fundamentals could be leveraged to provide the adoption that many high-cap vapourware projects never accomplished.