Once Called ‘Bitcoin 2.0’, Mimblewimble-based Privacy Coin GRIN Falls Into Obscurity

Publically launched a year and a half ago, Grin Coin (GRIN) was lauded for its potential to bring ironclad privacy crypto transactions at scale. It was the first release of a cryptocurrency built on the Mimblewimble blockchain protocol, whose mysterious origins and brilliant design had some calling Grin ‘Bitcoin 2.0’.

Since then, interest in the privacy coin seems to have waned across every metric.

Starting with its publically traded price, GRIN has (not unlike most altcoins) completely collapsed in the past year or so. But notably, it has not been one of the altcoins to recover a significant amount of lost ground like many did in late 2019/early 2020.

GRIN chart by TradingView

If we look at a weekly GRIN/USD(T) chart below, however, we might note one glimmer of light: the constantly falling price may have found a floor at around $0.50, as a very large bullish divergence can be seen on the RSI underpinning almost all of Grin’s price history.

Hashrate on Grin’s network has also utterly (ostensibly) collapsed in 2020, now putting out as much as 1/20th of its all-time-high level of 5.77 mega-graphs-per-second – although there is more to the story in this regard.

source: 2miners.com

The steep drop off may be explained by the scheduled changes in mining algorithm, which has occurred every six months since Grin went live in an effort to slowly phase-in ASIC miners and give GPU miners a chance to mine their fair shares before industrial mining dominates.

Finally, we might take a look at Grin’s Github activity. Indeed, we see a steady decline in the number of Github commits in the last year.

source: Github

Despite all this downtrending, however, Grin is still alive as a project. A look at the public-only funding of Grin shows that the team still have well over a million dollars in USD-equivalent crypto in their coffers, which will doubtless be used to continue funding the project.

Featured Image Credit: Photo via Pixabay.com