It is the first of the four forks that has been executed within Grin’s first two years of life. The update did not lead to a split of the network into two chains.

The Grin project, one of the cryptocurrencies focused on privacy using the MimbleWimble protocol, successfully completed the anti-ASIC hard fork scheduled for July 17th, 2019, at the height of block 262,080.

One of the main objectives of the scheduled fork is to avoid the development of ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) equipment mining for one of the algorithms of this cryptocurrency, which is only compatible with processors (CPU) and graphics cards (GPU).

According to a release shared by developer John Tromp’s last May, there is no evidence that users are mining with ASIC equipment. However, Obelisk launched an ASIC set for mining Grin approximately six months ago.

For this reason, to stop the development of ASIC for the Cuckaroo29 Prof-of-Work (PoW) algorithm, the update included changes to it. This version will offer greater resistance to the mining with this equipment and will favor the mining with CPU and GPU. However, it should be remembered that Grin works with the Cuckatoo31+ algorithm, which is compatible with ASIC architecture hardware.

The hard fork also allowed making some changes to the API (Application Programming Interface) of the node and to the Grin wallet. According to the developers, this generates a minor incompatibility that only affects wallets prior to version 2.0.0.

Before the fork occurs, the miners, nodes and exchange houses supporting the cryptocurrency only had to update the software and the wallets to version v2.0.0 or higher. These changes were made by activating the Grin anti-ASIC fork in the project’s test network. There the new version 2.0.0 of the network was launched on June 23rd at the height of block 185,040.

There remain 3 ASIC forks

It is worth noting that because of the fork, Grin’s previous network stopped working; therefore, the fork did not result in two different networks. The reason for this is that the code does not accept new blocks that surpass the height scheduled for the update, so the old blockchain stops.

The proposal for this first scheduled fork was announced on June 5th. The team’s plan is to work at regular intervals every six months, reaching 262,080 new blocks. Therefore, this is the first of four hard forks planned by the Grin development group for the project’s first two years. The other three hard forks are scheduled to match the height of blocks 524,160, 786,240, and 1,048,320.

Grin’s mainnet was activated last January 15th, 2019. The cryptocurrency shares most characteristics with Beam, although they have some differences, one of which deals with the management of two mining algorithms. Besides, there are no plans to limit the issuance of currencies. Consequently, Grin will have no halving (reduction in half of the reward per block mined).

Over the course of last week, the price of Grin in the market ranged between US $3.06 and US $3.82. Its value has registered a decrease in the course of the month of July. At the beginning of the month it was even quoted above US $4. On July 18th, it was quoted at about US $3.01.

By Willmen Blanco

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