The Grin hard fork occurred a few hours ago at the 262080th block.
Block 262080 has been mined, the first Grin hard fork has just happened!
— hashmap (@hashmap) July 17, 2019
Just a few months after the announcement in June of this year, the Grin fork came into effect yesterday and will bring several improvements especially with regard to mining. This first Grin hard fork introduced some simple modifications to Grin’s Cuckaroo29 PoW.
The aim is to improve the ability to be ASIC Proof and for this reason a fork must be carried out every 6 months, similar to what happens with blockchains like Monero. This fork has also updated the wallet so as to integrate different functions and APIs in relation to payment requests.
As John Tromp, developer of Grin, said, it is actually a soft fork and not a real hard fork because there is no and there will be no risk of dividing the blockchain in two:
“In a classical fork, the chain can split into two mutually incompatible continuations. … 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.”
The Beam Fork
Meanwhile, there was also the announcement of the first hard fork of Beam, another crypto based on the MimbleWimble protocol and focused on privacy.
The first hard fork will take place at the 321321st block and is expected to occur around mid-August. The main updates will concern:
- The transition of the PoW (Proof of Work) Beam Hash I algorithm to the Beam Hash II, which will be more resistant to ASICs;
- The obligation of the SBBS PoW (Secure Bulletin Board System), which allows transactions to be carried out even if the recipient is offline;
- A minimum fee will be forced by the nodes, which will be either 100 Groth (the smallest unit of Beam) or 10 * number of kernels + number of outputs;
- The support for the relative time locks.
In anticipation of Beam’s next hard fork, the Clear Cathnode 3.0.5654 software has also been released, which will have new features and support the Mac OsX Catalina.
