Grin investors are taking it on the chin today. The crypto, which uses the Mimblewimble protocol for privacy and scalability, has shed more than 5% in the last 24-hour period even as bitcoin set a fresh 2019 high. With BTC’s dominance currently hovering at 60%, altcoins typically remain highly correlated to their larger peer. Grin, however, has suffered some internal issues that have beaten down the price in the short-term. Grin’s price has more than doubled in June, however. The current problem appears to stem from “transaction difficulties” that users of the privacy coin are experiencing.

Grin Transactions Problematic for Crypto Users

Grin users are facing hurdles transacting in the privacy coin. According to an announcement by Grin developer Michael Cordner, who also goes by @ yeastplume, frequent changes to the “wallet APIs and the wallet exchange format” have outpaced the ability of exchanges to keep up with them. As a result, users have been frustrated trying to complete transactions with Grin. Cordner wrote:

“Please note that I’m not blaming anybody other than ourselves here, as we may have misjudged the difficulties inherent in trying to keep up with changes in Grin, and possibly overestimated the frequency of changes the community should reasonably be expected to handle.”

Grin users vented their frustration on Reddit, where one member said:

“You can barely transfer GRIN between wallets.”

Another user agreed, adding:

“It is true. The wallet situation is diabolical.”

The Grin dev further explains:

“There are a lot of mismatched and slightly incompatible versions of Grin and the Wallet out there…at the moment, and early versions of the code don’t have sufficient version awareness to help mitigate this.”

Given the volatility that’s already inherent in crypto prices, any hiccups in wallet transfers or other Grin transactions could be especially detrimental to investors.

https://twitter.com/grinMW/status/1143547418199248896

Grin’s Satoshi Takes Leave of Absence

Similar to bitcoin’s creator Satoshi Nakamoto, the identity of Grin’s lead developer is a secret. The lead developer, who goes by the pseudonym Ignotus Peverell, is taking an undetermined amount of time away from the project for personal reasons. If that name sounds familiar, it’s the name of a wizard in “Harry Potter.”

Cordner assured the community that given the decentralized nature of Grin, the project will forge ahead.

“As Grin is open source and not reliant on any single person or group in order to progress, our work continues uninterrupted in his absence.”

Grin has a network upgrade planned for the 2.0 release. Considering that it’s a required upgrade, this hard fork should provide some stability to ensure that all users are working from the latest version of Grin.