Grin, the censorship-resistant, and privacy-focused cryptocurrency have reportedly suffered a 51% attack on its network. This was revealed by the President of DTC Capital, Spencer Noon in the following tweet.
Grin is experiencing a 51% attack
— Spencer Noon đź•› (@spencernoon) November 8, 2020
The altcoin mining pool, 2Miners also revealed that the Grin Network was under the 51% attack on the wee hours of the 8th of November notified the community that the payouts were stopped. The platform also urged the miners to mine at their own risk because the new blocks mined could be rejected.
As depicted in the picture below, an unknown miner had taken over 57% of the total hash rate. This, in turn, gave the attacker the ability to reorganize blocks. However, Grin developers have denied signs of an attack while confirming a massive spike in the hash rate of the network.
This development comes nearly three months after the privacy-focused cryptocurrency was claimed to be no longer resistant to mining with Application-Specific Integrated Circuits [ASICs. This was revealed by a former core Grin developer Gary Yu, who purportedly used a Grin ASIC mining device to test out the miner’s performance.
According to the post, Yu managed to mine three blocks in less than a day, with a block reward totaling 180 GRIN. ASIC-powered mining occurred at block heights 819660, 820461, and 820801, Yu asserted.
It is important to note that Grin had apparently been ASIC-resistant and was only available for mining through Graphics Processing Units [GPU]. Grin executed the first hard fork in 2019 in a bid to block the possibility of mining the coin with ASICs. Before this event, the network’s algorithm supported mining with both GPUs and ASICs, but no one used ASIC mining to mine Grin.
Grin-MimbleWimble History
Native to the MimbleWimble blockchain, Grin was first launched on the 15th of January 2019, as a censorship-resistant, privacy-focused cryptocurrency. It was an individual under the pseudonym of Tom Elvis Jedusor [the name of Potter’s arch-nemesis, Tom Riddle, in French] who reportedly signed onto a Bitcoin research internet relay chat [IRC] channel, and posted a document hosted on a Tor hidden service, Jed16, and then signed out.
The coin was named for a curse in the “Harry Potter” book series. Similar to bitcoin, no person or entity controls the network. Moreover, the first coins were not distributed through an initial coin offering [ICO] or premine and hence there was no “founders reward”.