Why So Serious? Just GRiN.

Grin is one of those projects I give so much hell about because it’s one of the least convenient coins on the planet. No normie is going to adopt it unless its wallets and blockchain actually become super simple to use.

BUT…

I cannot deny it’s privacy. And for that… I think it’s time I give ol’ Grin it’s due. I don’t think I’ve given it the fair shake I should have considering how powerful its privacy is. In an adversarial environment, like the one we find our world in… absolute privacy and anonymity is worth its weight in literal gold.

This is another entry in my series highlighting cryptocurrencies with the properties of money, focusing on those that preserve your privacy. As always, we’re keeping the technical jargon to a minimum while giving you the essential information you need to understand what makes this currency special.

Grinning at Financial Privacy

Grin (Ticker: $GRIN) is a privacy-focused cryptocurrency that uses innovative technology to ensure your transactions remain confidential. Like physical cash, Grin keeps the details of your financial activities between you and whoever you’re transacting with.

Grin uses a pure implementation of the Mimblewimble protocol (the same underlying tech Beam uses) that makes private transactions both secure and incredibly lightweight.

We’ll get into the cool tech stuff below, but first, as we always do, let’s check out how Grin stacks up as a money:

Durable	✅
Portable	✅
Divisible	✅
Fungible	✅
Unit of Account	✅
Medium of Exchange	❌
Decentralized	✅
Private	✅
Scalable	✅

Tokenomics

Grin keeps things dead simple when it comes to creating new coins. There’s no dramatic halving event every few years like you see in some other cryptocurrencies. Instead, new Grin appears at exactly the same speed forever: one Grin every second, from day one until the end of time. No upper limit, just a steady, predictable drip.

All those coins are completely identical to each other. One Grin is always indistinguishable from another. There’s no way to mark a coin as “bad” or trace its past in a way that makes it different from any other.

What’s great is that the total amount of Grin in existence is still 100% public and verifiable. Even though the individual transaction amounts are hidden, the blockchain still proves, with zero doubt, that nobody is sneaking in extra coins beyond that one-per-second schedule. Anyone can check the numbers themselves and see everything adds up perfectly.

For the numbers folks out there:

• Coins are denominated in GRIN, with the smallest unit being a “nanogrin” (0.000000001 GRIN).
• Block rewards are fixed at 60 GRIN per block (1 per second, roughly).
• The emission is coded into the protocol and publicly verifiable.
• The Grin supply is uncapped, with around 216 million in circulation as of November 2025, growing by approximately 2.6 million per month. This is about 31 million new coins per year- it’s way more inflationary than I’m comfortable with.

This means if Grin ever hits global adoption (which I doubt due to the convenience issues outlined below) its price could stabilize as a circulating currency rather than a hyper-deflationary asset like bitcoin core. That said, it will be useful as a privacy-preserving currency like Monero, Beam, Zano, or Pirate Chain.

Merchant Adoption… or not…

If you’re a business you’ll need a way to accept $GRIN…

But there’s isn’t a way at the moment… or at least one I could find.

From their documentation:

…cryptocurrencies with transparent protocol-level addressing and immutable, unprunable blockchains can prove sender, receiver, and amounts of payments simply by pointing to the transaction in the blockchain. Grin’s privacy and scalability means users no longer have this ability. This prevents some merchants from accepting Grin due to the high possibility of payment disputes that are unresolvable in the same way they are for transparent coins.

This doesn’t mean the guy at the flea market couldn’t take Grin as payment… it just means he’s probably not going to because of the difficultly of receiving payment.

To me… this is a really big strike against Grin. If it’s not convenient… people just aren’t going to use it.

Community

Grin maintains a relatively active presence across multiple platforms where you can engage with developers, users, and privacy enthusiasts. You’ll find regular technical discussions, development updates, and community initiatives happening on:

• Official Grin Home Page
• Forum: Detailed technical discussions and proposals
• GitHub: Source code and technical documentation
• Keybase/Telegram/SimpleXChat
• Community Hub

The project also maintains a comprehensive documentation hub, which serves as a reference for everything from basic concepts to technical deep-dives.

Development activity remains steady, with the community currently working hard to improve privacy and usability. Governance is community-driven through the Grin Community Council (GCC), which handles funding from donations via rotating multisig wallets; no foundation or central entity.

Mining

Getting involved with Grin mining is straightforward, though you’ll want to check the latest mining guides as the specifics can change with protocol updates. The important thing to know is that Grin uses a mining algorithm (Cuckatoo32+) that has become ASIC-friendly over time, meaning specialized hardware dominates but GPUs can still participate to some extent.

Designed for Privacy and Architectural Minimalism

Grin is designed with a minimalist architectural approach to privacy and functionality. While its user experience is inconvenient due to its complexity, the underlying protocol is kept exceptionally simple and pure.

Complex Basic Transactions but Pure Privacy

No Confidential Assets or Smart Contracts. Grin keeps it simple: no built-in tokens, no scripting, no DeFi, no NFTs. It’s pure digital “currency”, focusing on fungibility and scalability. All coins inherit the same privacy features that make Grin special.

Interactive Transaction Model versus Non-Interactive Transaction Model

The primary difference between Grin and almost every other cryptocurrencies lies in the way user transactions are handled. Most cryptos use a non-interactive model: this one-step process is fast and simple, like mailing a letter to a static address, and is the global standard. Enter the amount, sender address, and hit send.

Grin, however, uses an Interactive Transaction Model, which is extremely inconvenient for spontaneous payments. It uses a multi-step process that requires a “digital handshake” where the sender and receiver must actively exchange data in real-time to jointly construct the transaction.

You create a file called a slateback (The word comes from “slate,” the technical term for the transaction data, and “pack,” because it’s bundled as a file.), send it to the user through a messaging app (you read that correctly), then the receiver downloads the slateback file, adds it to their Grin wallet, and then performs a “signing” steps to receive the funds. Oh… and both sender and receiver have to be online at the exact same time to for this to work.

The reason for this coordination for every single payment has to do with Mimblewimble’s security and privacy; it prevents coins from ever being lost by ensuring they stay with the sender if the transfer fails, and it avoids standard address tracking.

Personally… I’m not sure it’s worth the hassle.

I found this GitHub thread where someone wanted talk about simplifying transactions for users. However, the proposal failed to reach consensus, sort of fizzled out, and then was closed.

Because the Grin community hasn’t really chosen to change anything in terms of user convenience… it maintains the original, high-friction transaction model so the network remains impractical for spontaneous, everyday payments. To me, this lack of change means that Grin will remain an interesting technical experiment rather than a useful currency.

How to Get Grin

Let’s say you want to play with Grin despite the inconveniences. Maybe the hardcore privacy features are worth it to you. How do you get your anonymous hands on it?

First, get yourself a wallet that supports $GRIN. You can find several for different platforms on the official page.

Recommended wallets:

• Grin++ (desktop/mobile, fast sync, TOR integration, very user-friendly)
• Ironbelly (mobile)
• Niffler (lightweight)
• Official CLI (for advanced users)

The most anonymous way to get GRIN is to mine it. But if that’s not your thing you can get it from a bunch of different places like:

• Gate.io

And of course, you can ask for donations or sell goods and services for Grin.

For the Nerds

This gets fairly technical. You’ve been warned. 🤓

Security

Grin’s security model is built on the foundation of the Mimblewimble protocol. Interactive transactions require active participation from both the sender and receiver, creating a robust two-party security protocol. The system enforces a window for completion, during which both parties must contribute their signatures.

At the network level, Grin implements the Dandelion++ protocol, adding an extra layer of privacy before transactions even reach the blockchain. This protocol obscures the origin of transactions by routing them through a series of nodes in a way that makes it practically impossible to determine where a transaction originated.

Technical Implementation

Grin’s Mimblewimble uses “cut-through” to aggregate and prune spent outputs, keeping the blockchain tiny (around 6 GB after six years). No addresses mean no reusable keys, reducing surveillance vectors. Outputs are owned by blinding factors, and kernels prove validity without revealing data.

The system ensures fungibility: all GRIN are identical, no taint from history. Mathematical proofs verify no inflation occurs, preserving the integrity of the entire system.

Scalability

One of Grin’s strongest features is how it handles scalability, and this comes from two main architectural decisions:

1. Protocol Efficiency: Thanks to the Mimblewimble design, nodes can prune spent outputs from the blockchain while maintaining full security. This means the blockchain size grows much more slowly compared to traditional cryptocurrencies.
2. Minimal Overhead: The lack of scripting or extras keeps overhead minimal. Blocks are generated every minute, supporting high throughput without bloat.

Development Activity

Grin’s development team has consistently pushed the boundaries of privacy tech in the crypto space. Some notable technical milestones:

• Pure Mimblewimble implementation.
• Community-funded improvements to wallets and node efficiency.
• Ongoing work on atomic swaps for trustless trades.

As of late 2025, it’s in maintenance mode with discussions on positioning, mining, and tech support active on the forum. No flashy roadmaps, but steady volunteer contributions.

Grinning the Path Forward

None of this should be construed as financial advice, but if you care about financial privacy, here’s what makes Grin worth your attention.

When we talk about sound money in the digital age, most conversations focus on scarcity, reliability, or transaction speed. But there’s something more fundamental at stake: your right to financial privacy. Physical cash gave us this naturally; when you handed someone a dollar bill, that transaction stayed between you and them. Grin preserves this essential feature of money but without the conveniences of currency.

Along with other privacy-preserving currencies like Monero, Beam, and Pirate Chain, Grin is part of a technological movement pushing back against the erosion of financial privacy. Each project takes its own approach, but they share a common goal: protecting your fundamental right to transact without surveillance.

As governments and corporations push for more financial surveillance, the need for privacy-preserving currencies becomes more urgent. The choice between privacy and functionality is a false one; Grin and its peers demonstrate that we can have both. The future of money should enhance our financial sovereignty, not diminish it.

Is it money?

In my opinion… Absolutely Not. It’s not practical in any sense of the word. A currency needs to be convenient in order to be a money. It’s clunky, requires coordination, and kills spontaneity. Grin has brilliant privacy tech and is one of the most cypherpunk projects in existence, but as actual spendable currency? It fails hard. I respect the tech, I align with the principles… but we can’t pretend you’re going to be paying for coffee with slatepacks anytime soon.

Grin has a cult following for good reason… I’m glad to add it to the pantheon of crypto coins that put preserving financial rights above surveillance greed.

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