There are several coins based on the MimbleWimble protocol.
The one that has been around for the longest time is Beam, which over the months has recorded large fluctuations with true ups and downs.
The cryptocurrency debuted on the markets in January 2019 with an initial price of about $0.66. In the first two weeks after the launch, the price rose to $2 and then fell back below $0.4 in early June of that year.
At that point, it had another peak, which brought the price almost to $2.5 at the end of June, before falling back to $0.5 at the beginning of March 2020. During the mid-March crash, the price of Beam fell to $0.2 and then settled around $0.3.
Grin‘s trajectory was more unfortunate, as it debuted on the market a few days after Beam with a price of almost $10. However, the price began to fall almost immediately, reaching $2 in early June 2019.
At that point, it peaked, more or less at the same time as Beam, which brought the price back above $6 at the end of June, and then fell back to below $1 at the beginning of March 2020. During the mid-March collapse, the price fell below $0.4 and has been fluctuating around $0.5 ever since.
MimbleWimble Coin (MWC) only debuted on the market in February 2020, with an initial price of around $20. With the collapse of the markets in mid-March, it fell below $4 but then recovered, rising to $27 in early May. It now fluctuates around $15.
Unfortunately, in November 2019 Ivan Bogatyy revealed that he was able to de-anonymize MimbleWimble’s data, in particular by being able to read 96% of Grin’s transactions.
According to Bogatyyy, MimbleWimble would be fundamentally flawed, and:
“should no longer be considered a viable alternative to Zcash or Monero when it comes to privacy”.
For example, the price of XMR (Monero) has been on the rise since January 2019, going from around $50 to around $60, while the price of Zcash is slightly down from around $60 to around $50.
Bogatyy actually failed to find out the data related to the transaction amounts, but he was able to find out the addresses involved in the transactions, resulting in the need for an effective patch for MimbleWimble.
A few days ago Grin was defined a dead project, with no signs of life, but in reality, the developers are continuing to work on it, with the release of the Grin v4.0.0 Network Upgrade (HF3) scheduled for July 15th, 2020, while the beta version should be available already on June 2nd.
In addition, updates have been published on the Grin website continuously after November 2019, so the project is still alive and fully operational.
The Beam project also continues, with a second hard fork scheduled for June 28th.
A different story applies to MWC because it’s a new project that began in April with a first hard fork.
This is thus a delicate phase for the MimbleWimble-based coins, as it is necessary to improve the project to make it more effective and secure in the protection of transaction data.
Competition from other high-level privacy cryptocurrencies with a more reassuring history behind them, such as Monero, could be a difficult obstacle to overcome in order to spread, but the fact that there are as many as three different teams working with this protocol, suggests that the development in this specific area is continuing relentlessly.
