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MimbleWimble-based Privacy Coin, Grin, Suffers 51% Attack

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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.

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.

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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.

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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”.

Litecoin MimbleWimble Testnet On Track To Launch By End Of September

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The entire Litecoin community has been anticipating the implementation of the privacy protocol, MimbleWimble into the network. While Grin developer, David Burkett has been working on the MimbleWimble project since last December, the implementation is in its final stages. The Grin Developer shared a post highlighting, the progress of the MimbleWimble implementation during the month of August.

Testnet To Roll Out In September

Burkett seemed to have checked off all that he had planned for the month of August as he revealed the same in his blog post. The Grin developer pointed out that he concluded the Initial State Download, specifically the validation of the MWSTATE messages. Burkett, however, believes that “malicious peers” could find a way into the new messages and use them to DoS nodes. He also added that he would focus on the aforementioned concern post the release of the testnet.

Burkett further wrote,

“I also took advantage of the opportunity to go back and clean up some code & strengthen some of the more fragile logic, particularly around management of the UTXO set (the collection of unspent coins).”

Furthermore, the blog post highlighted the work that is underway before the launch of the testnet by the end of September. The testnet will reportedly entail a basic CLI or JSON-RPC protocols so that the users can engage in experiments while the developer includes non-interactive transaction support.

The implementation of the MimbleWimble protocol intends to bolster privacy as well as the fungibility of the network, despite its capabilities, the announcement paved the way to tremendous backlash. Several from the community believed that the implementation of this protocol could convert Litecoin into a privacy coin. Since privacy coins like Monero have endured increased scrutiny, the community feared that LTC would join the list after the implementation of MimbleWimble. The latest update, however, led to many individuals suggesting that MimbleWimble had the potential of becoming a “game-changer” for the Litecoin network.

Back in August the developer sought more funds for the development of the MimbleWimble protocol as the previously accumulated funds were as low as $3000.