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David Burkett edited this page Apr 13, 2020 · 12 revisions

1. Project state & planning

  1. The present and historical roadmap is best captured by the issues and pull requests in the Github repo. A visualization for different time periods is available here.
  2. You can also review the project's milestones, present and past, and progress made against them.
  3. Any difference between the original roadmap and the actual progress in hitting the planned milestones, can be attributed to:
    • activity levels of contributors changing, as a result of unforeseen circumstances;
    • scope changing, as a result of internalising learnings and realisations; and
    • quality improvements being required, as a result of testing.
  4. Grin is an open source project that is developed iteratively. Anyone can propose and make improvements, and if those make sense, they get merged. It does not follow the waterfall software development model. The original roadmap has evolved over time to factor in new learnings. Comparing the original roadmap with what was delivered to mainnet some two years later will not offer much insight.
  5. Roadmap for the next 12-18 months:
    • We expect to deliver approximately three major and 10-15 minor releases in this period, alongside countless of patches and fixes.
    • Three hard forks are scheduled in the period, six months apart. These will be used to introduce consensus breaking changes, and to tweak one of the two proof of work algorithms deployed in Grin, CuckARoo.
    • The next 3 months will be focused on improving quality and performance.
    • During months 4-15 some features and functionality being considered for inclusion are: FlyClient, relative timelocks, multisignature support on the wallet level, BetterHash mining protocol, P2P transaction building, confidential assets and improved wallet functionality.
    • The latter 3 months will be dedicated to more experimental research, such as layer 2 scaling, universal accumulators, BLS signatures, and construction of new harry potter spells.

2. Funding & Use of Funds

  1. As it's not possible to invest directly in the Grin project, there are no investors. As a result, there are no amounts raised from investors. We are 100% community funded, and this funding comes as donations with no enforceable strings attached. We are pretty much broke. 💸 On this note, we welcome contributions back to the Grin development fund as part of any profits you will realise from listing Grin on your exchange.
  2. In terms of stakeholders, we consider the entire Grin community to be stakeholders in the project.
  3. There is no founders' reward.
  4. In terms of expenditures and crypto holdings, see currently active funding campaigns as well as the previous campaigns. Funds have been used for protocol development and security audits.

3. Use cases

  1. Grin aims to be a scalable, lightweight, privacy-preserving cryptocurrency that makes it easy to send electronic transactions between any party that are fungible and censorship-resistant.
  2. Grin restricts information shared publicly on chain on the protocol level, and there is no way to opt-out of privacy features. Transacting parties can however prove:
    • That they are in possession of a particular UTXO. See here.
    • That they participated in a transaction. See here.
  3. Demonstrations of Grin products:

4. Performance & stats

  1. Live mainnet data and charts from:
  2. Grin repo stats
  3. Other useful stats:
    • Number of pre-sale tokens issued: None
    • Size of founder's reward: None
    • Amount of SAFT agreements: None
    • Advisors involved: Not applicable
    • Total exchange listing fees paid: $0
    • Amount spent on marketing & promotion: $0

5. Community

  1. Forum
  2. Main project chat is on Gitter:
  3. Mimblewimble technical mailing list, 924 active members.
  4. Discord group, 5.5k+ members.
  5. Selected Telegram chats:
  6. Meetup groups:
  7. Example of events, past and future:

6. Team Structure

  1. Ignotus Peverell is the anonymous founder of the project, which was created on October 20 2016, with the purpose to implement the Mimblewimble protocol. The motivation for this was because the technology was seen as having a lot of potential to enable a scalable and fungible cryptocurrency and deserved to be experimented with further.
  2. There is no management team of the project. There is no operations team. There is no marketing team.
  3. Data over lead developers, core contributors, and GitHub profiles here.
  4. Contributors are distributed all over the world, some in known locations such as Singapore, Berlin, The Netherlands, London, Dublin, Canada, and California, others working from unknown geographical locations.
  5. Project decisions are made in bi-weekly governance and development meetings on Gitter, in as transparent manner as possible. See here for more information and past meeting notes summaries.
  6. The core contributors to this project are very dedicated, with daily participation for months and years, without receiving any form of payment or compensation for their involvement. With the sole exception to this rule being Yeastplume, who's been financed to work on the project full time via donations from the community since Feb 2018.
  7. The project team has no official advisors, but considers members of the community and subscribers to the technical mailing list to be advisors to the project.

7. Token Governance

  1. Grin's emission is in absolute numbers 1 grin/s, forever.
  2. This is realised through 1 minute blocks, with a 60 grin Coinbase reward, in all perpetuity.
  3. Emission as a percentage of all created grins therefore decreases asymptotically towards zero over time.
  4. A thorough study about the monetary policy of the project is here.
  5. The value of Grin will be determined based on the demand that exists to purchase the coin, vis-a-vis the amount of coins being produced through the linear emission; If DeltaDemand > DeltaSupply, the value of a single grin appreciates, and if not, the value decreases.
  6. We imagine people who have a need to use fungible, digital cash will prefer to use Grin thanks to its elegant design, good scalability, and powerful technology.
  7. As a project, we do not engage in price discussion or speculation. Price is not of interest to us, nor is it directing the project. Improvements to security, performance, scalability, and privacy do.

8. Token Utility

  1. The rate of adoption for Grin is not something that has been forecasted, but we see this as something that will take considerable time. Bitcoin has existed for 10 years, and overall adoption is still low.
  2. We do not see any downsides with having a linear emission schedule.

9. Commercial / Partnerships

  1. The project has no partnerships.
  2. All donations received come with no strings attached. Donors cannot exert influence over the project. More info here.
  3. Grin does not comment on other projects, in general. A statement about other mimblewimble projects can be found here.
  4. Grin does not offer perfect privacy, see details here. It's a functional implementation with good privacy capabilities, especially when factors like usability, scalability, and overall performance has been taken into account.
  5. With regards to exchange integrations, this was discussed in a recent governance meeting. In general, we welcome any serious exchange to list the coin. We do not approach exchanges ourselves, and we do not make applications to be listed. We do not pay listing fees. Thus far we've have had conversations with 10+ exchanges, ranging from the small and relatively unknown, to the most known and well established actors in the industry.

10. Tech stack

  1. There are no private repos.
  2. Selected repos from https://github.com/mimblewimble:
    • /grin: Main repo, containing node and reference wallet.
    • /grin-miner: Open source miner and plugins for OpenCL and CUDA with different memory requirements for the CuckARoo and CuckAToo proof of work algorithms.
    • /grin-web-wallet: GUI for the wallet, built in AngularJS.
    • /site: The source code for the project website https://grin-tech.org.
    • /grin-explorer: Grin blockchain explorer.
    • /grin-pm: Contains meeting notes, task tracking, and meeting agenda points for governance.
    • /docs: Collaboratively edited documentation of the Wiki kind.
    • /rust-secp256k1-zkp: Rust wrapper for cryptographic operations on secp256k1. Used for range proofs, Pedersen Commitments, etc.
    • /secp256k1-zkp: Optimized C library for Elliptic Curve operations on curve secp256k1.
  3. The combined hashrate is expected to grow over time, as the project becomes more popular, as ASICs become more profitable and more prevalent, and as the Coinbase rewards of 60 grin/block become more attractive.
  4. ASIC Targeted CuckAToo and ASIC Resistant CuckARoo algorithms co-exist for the first 2 years, with CuckARoo starting at 90% of rewards, and decreasing linearly to 0%; and CuckAToo starting at 10% and increasing to 100%. This balance is maintained through dynamically adjusting difficulties of the AR proof of work, as can be seen here.
  5. Here is a comparison between Rust and C++ from Feb 2018. The official website also explains why Rust is a good choice, and another useful read might be this one from Parity.
  6. We no longer use a DAG to represent transactions in the mempool.
  7. One of the benefits of Grin is that to start and sync a new node with the chain, only the UTXO set, the block headers, and the transaction kernels need to be downloaded and validated. This provides the equivalent security guarantees as a "full node" does in other projects. More details here.
  8. The current priorities of the team is to improve the technical documentation and to prepare for version 1.1.0 of Grin:
  9. In terms of functionality,
    • A full node = any node, there is no "light node" in Grin.
    • wallet713 works without running your own node locally on both macOS and Linux.
    • Hardware wallet support is not yet available, but is expected to come later this year.

11. Legal

  1. To our knowledge, there are no past or current outstanding legal cases against anyone related to the project. We have limited ability to know this for a fact as there are a lot of contributors, and many prefer to be anonymous.

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