Grin Cryptocurrency Just Executed Its First Hard Fork

The privacy altcoin named Grin has just executed its first backward-incompatible upgrade – known as a hard fork. The Grin cryptocurrency upgrade was planned for today and just concluded – introducing key changes to the nearly $60 million worth network that will optimize for maximum miner decentralization and usability.

For all of you who haven’t followed our coming altcoin news, Grin launched in January 2019. However, as a Grin developer named John Tromp said, the hard fork was planned before.

“It was planned since way before Grin launched. We would do four hard forks in the first two years, at regular six-month intervals, to introduce new features.”

The developer at Grin cryptocurrency was featured in the latest cryptocurrency news for stating that the upgrade did not result in a network split. Rather than that, the Grin network simply halted “in its tracks” which forced users to update their software. The upgrade was completed at 9:45 UTC.

“In a classical fork, the chain can split into two mutually incompatible continuations.
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… In Grin, there is no way to continue growing the ‘old’ chain since the old code refuses to accept any blocks past the [hard fork] height,” he explained.

One of the most integral changes for the Grin cryptocurrency and the Grin network in general today has been a tweak to one of two mining algorithms. As we previously reported in our altcoin news, Grin supports a mining algorithm which is friendly towards both general-purpose computing devices (GPUs) and specialized hardware called ASICs.

Another developer at the Grin cryptocurrency and a software engineer at the blockchain startup BlockCypher named Quentin Le Sceller, recently said:

“It’s not really forking ASICs from the network but ensuring that no one is building ASICs for the [GPU-friendly mining algorithm.]”

Therefore, the Wednesday update ensures that the playing field remains free of ASICs for the short-term future of the Grin protocol, preventing a monopoly on the Grin mining industry.

Many best cryptocurrency news sites report that additional tweaks to the newly implemented mining algorithm will be activated by the Grin cryptocurrency developers in the coming months. Tromp also affirmed that for the second Grin fork, developers will add payment channels to the network.

“[Payment channels are] a way for two parties to perform many off-chain transactions between them,” Tromp concluded. “[It requires] one on-chain transaction at the outset and one settlement at the end.”