About Grimm
Edit:
My name is Vladislav Gelfer, I’m a Beam lead dev (@valdok).
First, I never accused any other crypto project of fraud in the past. We maintain good relationships with many other projects, especially those focused on MW development, we share and discuss ideas in a form which all can benefit.
However I’d like to warn against the Grimm project. According to my understanding, Grimm team misleads its potential users, and can be defined as fraudulent.
The line of argumentation of Grimm promoters comes essentially down to 2 things:
1. Grimm is a classical fork of Beam, with new features implemented, such as “parallel assetchains”.
2. Unlike Beam, Grimm doesn’t include the investor and devs reward (treasury), hence it’s free for everyone without commission.
I will explain why both those arguments are misleading.
Assetchains
The feature which Grimm people call “assetchains” is not new. It actually consists of 2 different things: (1a) ability to create and run different (incompatible) blockchain configurations, and (1b) support for different asset types.
Both those features were implemented by Beam, and existed along before.
- (1a) Parallel chains
The ability to create distinct blockchain configurations that can run in parallel without the risk of mixing was developed by Beam at a very early development stage. This way we currently run mainnet, masternet, and testnet without interference, as well as give our partners ability to run their testnets for tests and development.
Any change to the consensus rules (either via command-line argument, config file, or directly in the code) automatically creates a new blockchain that can run in parallel with others.
- (1b) Support for Assets
It was implemented by Beam about a year ago, and disabled by default (commit bf2f88086659776f67e97a08e9aac9e5f27eb361 ).
That means that anyone can enable it in configuration (set CA.Enabled = 1) and use it at will on a dedicated testnet, but not on the mainnet.
The reason it was disabled is because it was a proof of concept rather than a production-ready feature. Neither was it reviewed for potential flaws, nor thoroughly tested (as we usually do before bringing anything new to the mainnet).
Today we already know about vulnerabilities that should be taken care of. In addition to this, in the current implementation (which is used by Grimm) the asset type is NOT concealed. Meaning, the linkability problem, which is known to be the “Achilles heel” of MW, becomes even worse.
A year ago our focus has shifted to other things, and we left this feature unfinished. Now we resumed its development, and are going to release the Confidential Asset support (hopefully at the next planned fork), with blinded (concealed) asset types, Lelantus-MW support for Confidential Assets, and many other things taken care of.
As for Grimm “assetchains” — make no mistake, it’s just a year-old proof of concept developed by Beam. Whoever wonders — can just explore the github history of Grimm. They didn’t implement any new cryptographic functionality. They just set CA.Enabled = 1 in the configuration, and implemented an emission transaction via wallet CLI (based on our open-source tests and examples).
Removing the investor and devs reward (treasury).
I’m not going to argue if it’s a right or wrong thing to do. Since I, as a Beam dev, directly benefit from the treasury, my opinion is biased.
My argument, however, is that Grimm blockchain at the moment is NOT without commission either. Why is that? Because the Grimm blockchain is already being mined at a ridiculously low hashrate, 181K blocks are already mined at the moment of writing this. This means that 18 mln. Tokens have already been produced (which is, BTW, more than Beam treasury currently in circulation) at a very low cost. It’s not much different from premine in fact.
So, if you would like to get rid of Beam devs reward, why replace it by Grimm’s one? As I mentioned already, there is an easy way to take our code as-is, and just create a new blockchain configuration without any reward.
I can provide Grin as an example of a MW project without the devs reward. In addition to being real developers (who we all respect) they cared a lot about fair launch, and were mined with adequate difficulty from the very beginning.
Conclusion
So, based on the above, in my opinion the Grimm project is fraudulent. They call themselves MW developers, but in fact nearly all they did is in essence just a simple rebranding of Beam. They are misleading about the features they developed, and about their economic interest. It is also worth mentioning that Grimm people repeatedly spread speculative unconfirmed (mostly fake) news about their project (such as being a candidate for receiving big investments).
I am all for cooperation between projects, and we are doing this a lot with great projects in our space. However there is a fundamental difference between development of technology, and “selling” someone else’s code, without fully understanding it.
