Grin and Beam are about to hard fork. Will privacy coins become popular again?

Grin and Beam, the privacy concept coins that became popular at the beginning of this year, are about to have their first hard fork after their mainnet launch.

Grin’s official website shows that its first hard fork, the network upgrade of Grin v2.0, will occur at block height 262080, and is expected to take place at 8:27 UTC on July 17 (16:27 Beijing time).

This upgrade will improve the performance of POW, and its API node will be changed from v1/pool/push endpoint to v1/pool/push_tx endpoint. In addition, the upgrade will increase the flexibility and privacy of the wallet, the API will be changed to V2, and Slate V0 will be deprecated.

The Grin development team calls on miners, nodes, wallets, mining pools, exchanges and participants of the Grin protocol to upgrade their running versions to v2.0.0 or higher as soon as possible, but Grin users do not need to do anything. Grin has officially released version 2.0 for nodes and version 2.0 for wallets.

Another popular privacy coin project, BEAM, announced on its official Medium that it will perform its first hard fork, or network upgrade, at block height 321321, expected to be on August 15.

The upgrade includes: 1. The PoW algorithm is changed from Beam Hash I to Beam Hash II; 2. SBBS PoW will become a mandatory requirement; 3. The minimum fee is 100 Groth, or the node is forced to execute 10*number of cores + 10 number of outputs; 4. Support relative time lock.

Beam said that compatible versions of nodes, wallets, and miners will adopt Clear Cathode 3.0, and all users will need to upgrade their applications to the latest version.

The impact of a hard fork on the market is generally a sharp rise before the fork and a pullback after the fork, such as Ethereum.

However, the non-small market shows that Grin has not only not risen in the past 7 days, but has fallen by 32.41%, and is currently trading at $2.98, with a 24-hour drop of 12.34%. At the same time, Beam has also been mainly falling recently, with a drop of 16.89% in the past 7 days, and is currently trading at $1.19, up 1.48% in 24 hours.

Grin and Beam were the first to turn the bear market into a bull market in 2019. Grin had deviated from the market's silence at the beginning of the year and soared dozens of times, and Beam had also soared 500%. Since the launch of their mainnets this year, they have attracted much attention and have been questioned and controversial. Although Grin and Beam are continuing their "privacy dreams", continuing to develop projects, and carrying out hard fork upgrades as scheduled, it is still a question whether they can ignite market enthusiasm again after their coin prices have died.

The rise and silence of “2019 hot products” Grin and Beam

Compared with existing privacy coin projects, Grin and Beam are both based on the new protocol Mimblewimble. Both of them have their own brilliance and are full of idealism. Their mystery and uniqueness make them popular. Not only have they won the spontaneous support of many bigwigs, but they have also achieved astonishing growth after the mainnet was launched, creating the first hot spot for the market that was quiet at the beginning of the year - privacy concept coins.

Mimblewimble, the word comes from Harry Potter, and its original meaning is a spell that makes people slur their words. The Mimblewimble white paper believes that Bitcoin scripts should be abandoned, and recommends the use of a new underlying protocol, MimbleWimble, which has higher privacy, scalability, and substitutability.

Grin is the first privacy coin project to implement the Mimblewimble protocol. It has open source governance, no foundation, no ICO, no pre-mining "justice" spirit, and its total amount is unlimited, with the characteristic of wireless inflation.

(Source of image: TAMC "Anonymous Coin Research Report" Data source: coinmarketcap.com)

Beam is the first privacy coin to be launched on the mainnet based on the MimbleWimble protocol. It is often compared with Grin. Although it started late, it was launched on the mainnet before Grin. In a white paper, BEAM proposed that it adopted a structure similar to Zcash, which is in sharp contrast to Grin's anarchism and open source philosophy. In addition, BEAM has a dedicated team, and its public investment institutions include 13 well-known investment institutions such as Node Capital and Continue Capital.

Due to the uniqueness of the two projects, many bigwigs have spontaneously supported them. Martian Xu Zijing once posted on Weibo to support Grin, saying, "Grin may be the most hardcore digital currency in recent years, the one closest to Bitcoin fundamentalism; small blocks, pure anonymity, anti-censorship, cypherpunks, anarchism are once again making waves."

At the same time, in early January this year, when Grin and Beam were launched on the mainnet, both triggered a sharp rise in the price of the currency. When the Beam mainnet was launched, its price soared from $0.5 to $2.6, an increase of more than 500%, according to Feixiaohao.

Grin's increase was even more exaggerated. On the first day of its listing on the exchange, Grin's highest price reached US$261.65, and then fell sharply, but it still increased by 107.84% within 7 days of its listing.

The surge in Grin and Beam prices also completely activated the graphics card mining machine market that was dormant at the beginning of the year, allowing the shut-down machines to restart one by one. Mr. Wu, who was engaged in the computing power leasing business at the time, told Deepchain that recently, people have been inquiring about graphics card mining machine leasing every day, and most of them are for Beam and Grin, and the leasing period is mostly within four months.

However, although the market of Grin and Beam experienced a sharp rise in June, overall, the prices of Grin and Beam have died and plummeted many times this year. From March to May, Grin and Beam entered a silent period, and the currency prices were almost in a state of volatility, and market doubts followed.

Many people believe that Grin and Beam are both hype projects, and their technologies are superficial and not “hardcore” at all. In June this year, the departure of Grin’s anonymous founder Ignotus Peverell added to the gloomy atmosphere of the project after its popularity.

Author: Long Yue