Mimblewimble Privacy Coin Goes Live As The First Grin Block Is Mined

A new cryptocurrency is born. Grin, a new privacy coin that uses the Mimblewimble privacy tech, has just gone live for the first time as its genesis block has been mined. The new protocol, named after the famous Harry Potter books, is a protocol that basically melts together all the transactions from the individuals, so nobody can actually track them.

The hype for launch is big because the technology was already in the works since 2016 and it took a long time to be ready. Today at 17:38 UTC, the genesis block has appeared and a new era has begun for this tech. Mining is going fast now as the second block was mined just a minute later, according to a block explorer.

While Grin is not accepted in any exchange at the moment since no tokens have been pre-mined, the market is slowly taking some form. Each block awards the user with 60 Grin tokens and one investor has already put a bid for 1,000 Grin tokens for 0.1 BTC )about 0.37 USD per Grin token).

The order was put on a decentralized exchange called Bisq, which will be one of the first ones to list the token. In a very different strip of prices, a bid on Bitmesh is offering 10 BTC for 1 Grin (actually, 0.1 BTC for 0.001 Grin).

The Grin Network

The Grin network, as stated before, uses the Mimblewimble technology, which fuses transactions together, a different way from cloaking the transactions from other popular privacy coins like Monero and Zcash.

Grin is not the only one using the Mimblewimble technology, though, as another called Beam, which was created by an Israeli startup also uses it. A developer from Beam, Yeastplume, has affirmed that the two tokens are different but that they are not necessarily competitors and that both teams are happy to collaborate with each other. At one occasion, Beam even helped to raise funds for Grin’s development.

The Grin network uses a model that is fully based on donations and it is free from any kind of Initial Coin Offering (ICO) or pre-mine, something that the developers believe to be very important for the future of the company and that will help it to assure its decentralization in the future.

In fact, the company is so focused on decentralization that it is not using any kind of deflationary halving method, which they believe that would give an “unfair advantage” to early miners.

No ICOs and no early rewards can seem like a very bad for speculators and the kind of investor that wants to be special, but it is a great idea for a token that really wants to be money instead of a speculative asset.

At the moment, Grin already has over 7,000 followers on its Twitter account and it is creating a wide community of people who are fairly interested in helping the company to grow more along with its token.