Grin, the recently released and much hyped privacy coin, more than doubled in price today, January 26, as traded against bitcoin. The new cryptocurrency had a trading volume of more than $9.2 million, with the majority of it being trading on the HotBit exchange.

Today’s explosion was the culmination of a week of steady growth. As CryptoGlobe recently reported, Grin’s launch saw a – not unusual – initial collapse in price despite an impressive amount of mining power out of the gate. All told, Grin has seen well over 300% growth from last week’s bottoms.

grinchart1.png(source: Coingecko.com)

The new coin is one of two publically released implementations of the Mimblewimble protocol (the other being Beam), a method of constructing a blockchain that is inherently both extremely private and extremely efficient in terms of storage size.

One very notable and unique feature of Mimblewimble blockchains is that they do not utilize public addresses – users possess a private key, and must conduct direct peer to peer transactions. These direct connections are accomplished using either downloaded text files or “listener ports.”

The launch of Grin was attended by intense institutional interest in the coin, which offered no presale or initial offering of any kind. Therefore, the interest was directed to mining. Grin’s mining power was about one-third of Ethereum Classic’s ten days ago – and since then has grown by about 450%, according to Grinscan.net.

Despite this intense institutional interest, some popular analysts in the cryptoasset industry and community have maintained that “Grin’s launch was one of the fairest launches ever, if not the fairest.”

Responding to claims that such a highly feted launch could not remain fair, crypto notables Hasu and Arjun Balaji wrote:

[O]ur previous explorations have shown that the more competitive a mining market is, the fairer the distribution will be perceived, as competition guarantees that coins are delivered to the market at the smallest possible margin.

Hasu & Arjun Balaji

Grin’s list of exchanges is growing, with Kucoin adding the privacy coin two days ago.