GRN1 Cancellation Announcement

Due to a lack of interest and funding, Obelisk has had to cancel the GRN1 project. All who purchased the GRN1 directly from Obelisk will be receiving a full refund for their purchase. Refunds will be provided in the form of BTC equal to the USD value of the amount paid at the time of purchase. If credit was used, the credit will be added to the amount refunded. If coupons were used, the coupons will be returned as coupons.

Obelisk picked Grin as our next mining project because we saw great potential in the coin. There was a lot of early hype, and the social and political fundamentals for Grin’s development appeared to be more decentralized than any other cryptocurrency besides Bitcoin. This was very exciting to us, and is something that we felt made Grin substantially interesting among the newer cryptocurrencies.

An ASIC project is incredibly expensive, and we hit several barriers to getting enough funding to finish the project. One of the biggest barriers was the split block reward. The Grin devs determined that the best approach to creating a healthy mining ecosystem would be to split the block reward three ways, with one chunk going to GPU miners, one chunk going to a lower memory requirement Cucaktoo31 algorithm, and one chunk going to a higher memory requirement Cuckatoo32 algorithm. This split, combined with the fact that the Grin project has yet to gain substantial traction in the cryptocurrency marketplace proved to be an insurmountable barrier.

Of the three algorithms, Obelisk chose to target the the lower memory requirement Cuckatoo31 algorithm, with an intention of making a second generation of hardware to target the Cuckatoo32 algorithm before the transition to Cuckatoo32 kicked in. We felt that this approach would give us the strongest edge over the competing manufacturers. This strategy comes with a protocol enforced deadline though for getting the first generation hardware out, and due to fundraising constraints we were not able to make the deadline. Rather than delaying the shipping date and trying again, Obelisk is forced to abort the nearly complete project.

This is of course a disappointing outcome for Obelisk and its customers, however we are glad to be able to refund all of our customers in full, and we are also glad that we will be able to move on to the next project.