BlockCypher announces the availability of a testnet mining pool for Grin, the primary implementation of the MimbleWimble blockchain format. To learn more, see www.grinmint.com

A mining pool is a pooling of resources by miners who share their processing power over a network to split the reward equally, according to the amount of work contributed to the probability of finding a block.

Two years ago in 2016, a new implementation called Grin based on the MimbleWimble protocol came into existence. BlockCypher is always evaluating new blockchain technology and MimbleWimble caught our eye. We wrote an opinion piece about it on Coindesk in April 2017. In BlockCypher’s blog “MimbleWimble/Grin”, we share the reasons why what Grin proposes — privacy, freedom of choice, equal access, fungibility, and sustainable growth over time — are so very important for society.

The Grin blockchain strives to fix some of the major shortcomings in current blockchains. We believe the additional capabilities that have been included and enabled by its developers — such as lightning, Schnorr signatures, bulletproofs, Dandelion relay, “scriptless scripting”, atomic swaps — have greatly increased the probability of the Grin blockchain being able to address a multitude of use cases that have not been possible with the existing set of blockchains.

We’ve been quietly following and contributing to Grin’s development. Most recently, Grin Testnet3 came out this past July and we anticipate Grin Mainnet to debut at the beginning of 2019. We feel it is time to make BlockCypher’s support for this new blockchain known so that our customers and Grin users can plan accordingly.

First, we are releasing a mining pool for Grin based on Testnet3. We’ve been thinking about mining API services for a long time, dating back to 2014 when we were in accelerator BoostVC Tribe 4 with our friends at HashRabbit. Mining is extremely important to securing open blockchains. The easier we can make it for miners to participate, the more secure the network becomes. But by the time we were ready to start working on a pool implementation, there were already many established mining pools for the coins we supported. In Grin we see a nascent coin with unique technical and usability opportunities.

This release of our minimal viable product for a Grin mining pool will be continuously improved to make it more intuitive and user-friendly. We will transition it to Mainnet on launch. Currently, it includes:

User-specific dashboard with hashrate, balance, shares, and payout

Charts to see the pool hashrate, network hashrate, and network difficulty

Information about block height, time, and block hash

API endpoints for pool, user, and workers. These published APIs are for advanced users to monitor miners, get stats, history, and user information.

Miner reward follows the Pay-Per-Last-N-Share (PPLNS) approach which offers payment to miners as a % of shares they contribute to the total shares (N).

In addition, BlockCypher intends to donate a percentage of its pool proceeds to the Grin developer team. We believe contributing to the development of the open-source project is important for the community.

Over the past years, BlockCypher has provided high reliability and availability blockchain APIs for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dash and others (99.999% uptime for 4+ years!). We know how to keep large systems running 24x7. This Grin mining pool service provides another type of specialized API.

In the coming year, we will be releasing APIs to build wallets, send transactions, as well as other web services to enable developers to build applications for Grin. Grin has a number of technical challenges: e.g there are no “addresses”, transactions are a multi-step interactive key-building process, only unspent transaction outputs are kept in history, webhooks will need to be adapted, etc. These challenges fit nicely into BlockCypher’s skillset in continuously delivering unique, scalable and reliable APIs. We believe Grin addresses use cases which will lead to broader adoption of cryptocurrencies. With BlockCypher’s support, we hope to provide early access to miners and developers to build those applications.