Ok, so maybe the topic is a little misleading. Grin hasn’t given anyone a two million percent return (yet), but someone who hit the jackpot is clearly a friend of the project.
Learn more in the 2-minute video below.
Video transcript:
Welcome, welcome to One Minute Crypto! I’m your host, Chronos, and today I want to talk about what we’ve seen in the blockchain industry around fundraising. Specifically, I’ve been watching Grin, which is a privacy-focused cryptocurrency that’s taken a rather unusual approach: they’ve decided to go entirely donation-based. That’s right: no ICO, no developer tax, no premine. Most projects, like Ethereum for example, bootstrapped their development by creating an initial supply of tokens for investors, but Grin just started with a raw proof of work algorithm from zero supply.
The coin launched back in January of this year, and two weeks later, its founder, Ignotus Peverell, made a public announcement on the difficulty of raising money. He wrote, “Grin was started with as fair of a launch as possible for what’s under our control. The lesson for every development or research team watching looks pretty clear: more scammy ICOs for more money and a lot less work.”
Personally, I’m not against ICOs, or Initial Coin Offerings, if they’re done in good faith. After all, they’re somewhat similar to the way traditional companies raise money, by giving a piece of the company in exchange for investor funds. But I also have good news on Grin: earlier this month, its developer fund received a massive anonymous donation, worth over $400,000 at the time of this recording, from a bitcoin block mined back in 2010.
That’s right: one person mined an entire bitcoin block all by themselves and received the 50 bitcoin mining reward, which was worth $14 dollars at the time. Then, that miner sat on those 50 bitcoins for over 8 years, and watched their value go up by over two million percent. Talk about a good investment. Finally, they gave it all away to support Grin development, in a single public bitcoin transaction.
All that to say, even though Grin depends entirely on donations, it’s actually looking pretty healthy right now, but I want to hear from you. Which model do you think is better: raising money from investors, or depending on the goodwill of the community? Post your thoughts below.