First Grin Block Mined as Mimblewimble Privacy Crypto Goes Live

Grin, a cryptocurrency that leverages the mimblewimble privacy technology, has just gone live on mainnet.

Named after the tongue-tying curse in the Harry Potter book series, mimblewimble is a protocol that fuses transactions together such that they are indecipherable – even on a public digital ledger.

While it has been in the works since late 2016, Grin saw its first block of transactions (after the network's genesis block) appear Tuesday at 17:38 UTC. A second block was mined less than a minute later, according to one block explorer.

A market for the cryptocurrency is already beginning to form, and 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).

What is Grin?

It is the second cryptocurrency leveraging the tech to go live on mainnet, the first being created by an Israel-based startup known as Beam.

As highlighted by Grin developer “Yeastplume” in late October, though the two privacy-focused chains are separate, the projects are by no means in competition, with proponents at Beam even helping to raise funds at one point for Grin development.

Indeed, as stated on the official website, Grin is a fully donations-based initiative that is “launched fairly, free of [initial coin offering], pre-mine or founder’s reward.”

Unlike Beam, Grin has an unfixed monetary policy, meaning it issues tokens once every second.

This is meant to spur confidence in the coin as a currency, Yeastplume told CoinDesk back in December, adding that he didn’t want to “unfairly reward early adopters with an arbitrary deflationary halving schedule.”

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 now that it has officially launched.

Crypto miner image via Shutterstock