Toxic Grin Funds

Rants & Flames
1

Even if some people say they want this project to succeed, it’s hard to ignore the elephant in the room: there’s a million dollars sitting just out of reach, and the only thing keeping certain individuals from cashing out is Grin’s continued existence.

Consciously or subconsciously, they’re thinking: “If Grin would just die already, we could justify taking the money for ourselves.”

That’s why they refuse to invest any real capital into this project. The money itself has become a toxic motivator — turning leadership into an argumentative, defensive, passive, and territorial mess. But here’s the truth they don’t want to face: Grin isn’t going anywhere. So they can take their ill-gotten gains and leave.

This project deserves to be in the hands of people who see beyond a quick payout — people who actually believe in Grin’s future. Greed is holding this project back, plain and simple.

These same people don’t just resist onboarding exchanges; they cheer when devs leave, refuse to hire replacements, and toss crumbs at ongoing work to save face. But everyone can see it for what it is — hoarding funds in the hope that Grin collapses, so they can finally pocket what’s left. Any real spending on Grin contradicts their “master plan,” because it strengthens the very thing standing between them and their dream cash-out.

The only ethical thing to do now is simple: spend every last cent of the accumulated funds on Grin. Anything less is just another excuse to stash money for a golden parachute.

And it’s downright laughable when they say things like, “We’re being good stewards of the funds.”

Really? What are the funds for, if not Grin itself?

Your greedy little pockets?

Yeah, that’s what I thought.

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I’m the last person who wouldn’t spend money on Rust developers.
Unfortunately, we can’t find any developers.
Unfortunately, developers don’t grow on trees.

How about a bonus for anyone who recruits a developer? That would have to be linked to performance.
Do you know any developers?

Accumulating grin is quite difficult without multisig. Who should hold the money?

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To clarify — when I say “spend the funds on Grin,” I don’t mean converting the funds into Grin coins. What I mean is actually deploying those funds to support and grow the Grin project itself.

Here are some examples of what that could look like:
• Create more community bounties for development, design, documentation, or marketing work.
• Pay YouTubers, podcasters, and content creators to promote Grin and explain its unique technology and philosophy.
• Run targeted ad campaigns — on social media, privacy-focused platforms, or even crypto news outlets — to attract new users and contributors.
• Offer free promotional giveaways like limited-edition Grin merch, small Grin coin airdrops, or referral incentives.
• Fund Grin faucets (or restart existing ones) to let new users experience Grin firsthand without friction.
• Post hiring ads on platforms like Indeed, RemoteOK, or crypto job boards, and pay a skilled developer or recruiter to help screen and interview potential candidates.
• Hire one or two part-time developers at a fair yearly salary to provide consistent development and maintenance.
• Pay for wallet integrations with trusted services like Unstoppable Wallet, Guarda, or Edge, making Grin more accessible.
• Cover listing or maintenance fees for reputable exchanges, ensuring Grin remains available and easy to trade.
• Provide market-making support to maintain liquidity on both sides of trades — improving the overall user experience.
• Sponsor community events, hackathons, or Grin meetups to foster collaboration and attract new contributors.
• Commission professional audits or reviews of core code to increase trust and transparency in the project.

In short: use the funds to grow the ecosystem, not let them sit idle. Every unspent coin is potential energy waiting to be unleashed — energy that could strengthen Grin’s future right now.

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Pay big person for interview of grin and pay them with grin on the interview

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5

Yes, it should have been used like this long ago

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I would not have joined the council if I felt that there was an exit scam being planned. I’ve also seen no indication that the council have given up and want the project to fail. The matter of spending is always going to be a challenge for a decentralised project. There are times where everyone has a different view but we do our best to compromise and we usually lean towards the stronger opinions. At the moment the general sentiment is to not go on a spending spree. I was recently of the view that we should get spending but on reflection, my view now is that some problems money won’t solve. There’s a plethora of projects out there that have thrown cash at features that have gotten them nowhere. Beam is probably the best example of that. They have every feature you can think of but aren’t gaining traction. This fact leads me to believe that growth needs to be organic. Bitcoin grew organically. People worked on the project because they were excited. The excitement didn’t come around due to a marketing team or paid ads. Right now, the crypto market is saturated with ideas on the future of money. Most of us are here because we believe that privacy, integrity, and simplicity make grin a strong contender as humanity figures out what it needs. In the meantime, I’m confident that the council will be here to support anyone who wants to contribute. And that support includes funding.

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7

Yall only fund projects that GC members are involved in.

Sitting on 6 million dollars while this project doesn’t even have a mobile wallet is maximum stupidity.

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Did you forget about Iron-Belly (iOS, android) Grim mobile (android), Grin++ Mobile (iOS android)? That is three working mobile wallets in my count :thinking: .

I am not sure where you base this on?
Umbrel grin(mash), Telegram bot, MWixnet? Those are all open bounties, and only the Umbrel node implementation started with a GC member working on it, the Telegram bot was initially locked to renzokuken until he indicated he not longer wanted to work on it.

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We very recently agreed to fund a Rust Reference miner project, only to see the developer quit after repeatedly claiming to have reached a milestone which upon closer examination was based on a complete misunderstanding of the problem and the writing of bogus tests.

That project funding only served to waste everyone’s time.
But at least it didn’t waste any funds. Without the timely availability of expert reviewers, we’d have to make a choice between paying developers-for-hire in good faith (and risk uncovering problems with the work later), or delay payment while we seek trusted expert reviewers.

The best Grin software has been forged by developers who firmly believe in Grin and its principles of elegance, fairness and simplcity. Developers following their passion, at least up to the point where they are recognized as skilled and knowledgeable developers producing quality code, at which point they may seek financial support for continued development.

That’s why I advocate for a post-funding system, where we decide to reward developers after they have produced software that have proven to be a worthwhile contribution to the Grin ecosystem.

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I understand what you’re saying here @tromp but having a 6 million dollar unspent budget shows a huge failure of the spending committee. Representing either a major lack of initiative or an huge inability to deploy the funds. As such these funds have paralyzed the GC, and grin developement in general. This has all equated to having 0 skilled developers. This projects software has major issues and no one to fix them or no one to review pr’s with confidence to merge and for some reason 6 million fuvking dollars won’t do the trick.

It’s an embracement and a disservice to donators, surely no one donated money to this project for the funds to collect dust.

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how come unspent funds means failure? learning from several abandoned projects, afaik council ‘paused’ the funds until the product finishes to avoid wasting fund.

<I don’t want to abuse whataboutism>, however, seeing our brother Beam used to have several features/investors/developers more than grin… but Beam price now is lower than grin.

We should look at other perspectives to find the ways to let grin grow organically better.

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Responsible fund management is not a failure. I think we need to find people who are not only willing to write code for Grin, but also understand Grin’s values. Expanding the community would probably help.

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It’s not only a major failure when an organization fails to spend donated funds but it’s also corruption!

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I completely agree. But over the years, I haven’t come up with a single working strategy for expanding the community. We need a trend, but setting it is no easy task.

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It’s hella easy actually, there a little button called “promote” you can pay 6k a day and reach over 5 million people daily but guess what? That requires ACTUALLY SPENDING THR DONATIONS”!!

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no. doing the same thing everyone else is doing is a failure. no uniqueness, just competition for views and clicks. we need a real cyberpunk, a killer feature that costs 60 million! but it will only be ours. money is a means

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18

we can find another 50 bitcoins. if we want to, but we need something wow

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for example if there was a way to convert bitcoin to grin instantly without intermediaries. I would like to launch such an initiative, but it is probably impossible

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We already have a killer feature, 7 years of linear emission…

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