Grin Developers Agree to Alter Technical Development Roadmap

The privacy-oriented Grin token held a developers' meeting where they agreed to hold off on making changes to planned proof-of-work updates for the foreseeable future.

In a move intended to give ASIC manufacturers a return on investment on the chips they have already built, a previously scheduled phase out of Cuckatoo32s chips will be delayed until past 2021.

After a public turnaround on the viability and inevitability of single chip ASICs - citing the improvements to heat density, lowered upfront costs, and potentially reduced electrical costs - of the technological usurpation, Grin is no longer supporting the mass-market miners that were compelled by market forces to run GPUs.

The team had originally pledged to keep single chip ASICs "At bay," but now that Grin-specific ASICs, differentiated by the SHA256 ASICs, have advanced to a position of market dominance and affordability, the team has committed only to eliminate Cuckatoo31s from the roster.

"In short, preventing single chip ASICs no longer seems worthwhile or feasible, but an earlier version of me thought it was, which had led me to the phase-outs," wrote Grin developer John Tromp.

Three foundries, Samsung, TSMC, and Intel should be able to produce the increasingly efficient Cuckatoo32 ASICs, said Tromp, whose backing hopes will provide the manufacturers with the confidence to continue production.

The developers also noted that in time if reason arises to decouple Cuckatoo31s, a simple code upgrade will enable Cuckatoo33s to supplant the outdated technology.

Prominent developer Yeastplume said, "First, as you know, 2.0.0 is just around the corner, which is our first scheduled hard fork. Fortunately for our current situation, this is a forced upgrade, which means that all users of Grin will have to upgrade their software to the 2.0.0 release."

"For whatever reasons many users and particularly exchanges haven't been keeping up with the latest versions of Grin," he wrote, which caused miscommunication between Grin and their wallets.

To ensure complete compliance, Yeastplume said that, "All current versions of Grin will stop working as of the HF block in a few weeks," hoping it won't come as a surprise when user's nodes quit.