Grin is a minimalistic, lightweight cryptocurrency, implementing the Mimblewimble protocol for a unique balance of privacy and scalability. The chain has no addresses, no amounts, and no need to store data of spent outputs.

Grin is fully open-source and community-driven. There is no single entity behind it, Grin’s development is funded by donations as well as done voluntarily by contributors. Everybody can discuss, influence, or work on its development.

Grin’s blocktime is 1 minute, each with a coinbase reward of 60 grins, thus creating 1 unit per second, forever. This linear emission creates a constant increase in supply, but a decreasing rate of inflation; making the emission disinflationary. This simple design serves to ensure both the long term security of the chain and a fair process of coin distribution to all participants.

In Aug 2016, an anonymous person using the nickname ‘majorplayer’, signed onto a Bitcoin research IRC channel, dropped a link to a document, then signed out. The document titled ‘Mimblewimble’ was authored under the pseudonym Tom Elvis Jedusor. Several developers took an interest, one of them being Andrew Poelstra, who later published a paper which added several refinements and a detailed technical description of the original whitepaper.

In Oct 2016, a developer under the pseudonym Ignotus Peverell began work on developing an implementation of the protocol and was soon joined by others in an effort to build the project which ultimately came to be known as Grin. It was launched on January 15th, 2019.