“Grin is intended to be medium-of-exchange, and Beam is intended to be for store-of-value”, says Mastering Bitcoin author

During the recent Q&A session, Andreas Antonopoulos, the author of Mastering Bitcoin, elucidated on the difference between Grin and Beam, the two cryptocurrencies that are based on the same protocol – MimbleWimble. The protocol enables the coins to make transactions without disclosing information of the amount and addresses involved in the transaction.

According to the author, MimbleWimble makes space for the optimization of privacy and scaling at the same time. The protocol was introduced in 2016 by an anonymous contributor who goes by the French name of Lord Voldemort, Tom Elvis Jedusor. He said:

“Immediately, an effort was made to implement this. The first effort, which started two years ago, is an open-source community project called Grin. It is primarily research focused to bring MimbleWimble to life by creating an implementation.”

This was followed by Andreas stating that Grin is an open-source project and that it is crowdfunded. Additionally, the coin was not pre-mined and there was initial coin offering [ICO] and a financial model that would support the development of the project, apart from the volunteers of the cryptocurrency community.

Whereas, Beam was introduced a year later with a completely different mode. The author stated that there was a foundation behind Beam and the project also has a pay-out to the Treasury. Andreas further stated that this project attracted investments from Venture Capital firms and that there was an organization that funds for the development of the project.

“They have two different approaches [to governance]: one is a very grassroots, community development model that is mostly research search focus. The other one is more commercially oriented, intending to [create] a viable commercial product. Grin has a command-line interface [for Linux, OSX and Windows], which is not that easy to use. Beam has a full graphical user interface and mobile wallet, which is easier to use.”

He went on to say that both the projects have different monetary models; Grin issuing 60 new coins per minute in a linear, continuous issuance schedule. On the contrary, the Beam has a monetary policy that is similar to Bitcoin, a fixed supply.

“The way these are [each] advertised or described by those developing them is, Grin is intended to be medium-of-exchange, and Beam is intended to be for store-of-value […] Grin and Beam are both open-source. Initially, Beam was not open-source, but they are now both open-source and exchanging code, learning from each other.”