Grin, the second implementation of a Mimblewimble blockchain (after Beam), has launched its mainnet as of January 15, and the new Proof-of-Work (PoW) privacy coin’s short life has been a bumpy one.

For a new chain, the network’s mining power has been impressive out of the gate, and has increased about 150% since then. TheBlockCrypto today put Grin’s hashing power at the equivalent of 88,200 GTX 1070 Ti 8GB graphics cards.

grin2.png(source: Grinscan.net)
At an average rate of 30 Megahash/second per card, Grim’s network is running on about 2.65 Terahash/second – about one third of the Ethereum Classic network’s current hashrate. (Grin’s mining power is measured in a different unit called “graphs per second,” owing to its hashing algorithm called Cuckoo Cycle which seeks to find connections in a graph.)

grin1.png(source: Coingecko.com)

The price has gone the complete other way since launch, falling from .072 BTC to .003 BTC in two days – a drop of about 95% – according to Coingecko.com.

‘Maybe the Most Expensive Genesis Block in History’

All of this mining power is due to a substantial amount of interest in Grin among investors and venture capitalists.

One such investor, speaking to CoinDesk yesterday, said that many like him think that Grin “kind of pattern-matches to ‘bitcoin 2.0.,’” and that a combination of investor interest in the coin combined with spare mining power in big mining farms has created “a perfect storm” of interest.

Some on Twitter have taken to criticizing the investor interest, however, pointing out that it clashes with Grin’s aspirations for a fair launch – without ICOs, without premining, or other “funny business.”

Responding to accusations that the intense interest and mining power already makes Grin a “shitcoin,” Twitter notable Hasu responded “Why not just say everything other than Bitcoin is a shitcoin, ad infinitum @bergealex4? By your warped definition, nothing else can ever escape that definition anyway.”