Grin gives strong anonymity guarantees but maintains most of the other public verification properties of a traditional blockchain like Bitcoin. It also includes some cool scalability optimizations to the Bitcoin-style of blockchain.
Anonymity is maintained with a cool trick called a blinding factor, where a secret value is drummed up for each transaction and used to obfuscate the data that is publicly displayed on the blockchain. Combining that with range proofs allows all involved parties to verify that the transaction was completed for the specified amount, and that no money was created out of thin air.
Scalability is boosted with transaction cut-through - a neat trick that lets unnecessary “intermediate” transactions get eliminated when a miner assembles a block. This means that nodes on the network can store the entire chain state really efficiently because all you need to know are the total coins in circulation, the UTXO set, and the kernels for each transaction.
I can’t do the whole thing justice in this tl;dr, so read the technical explanation here for more info if it piques your interest:
Grin hides the transaction amount and provides some transaction relationship obfuscation depending on how powerful your adversary is. I think Grin is cool and I'm very supportive of it, but much more work needs to be done to understand the anonymity provided especially against active attacks.
Anonymity is maintained with a cool trick called a blinding factor, where a secret value is drummed up for each transaction and used to obfuscate the data that is publicly displayed on the blockchain. Combining that with range proofs allows all involved parties to verify that the transaction was completed for the specified amount, and that no money was created out of thin air.
Scalability is boosted with transaction cut-through - a neat trick that lets unnecessary “intermediate” transactions get eliminated when a miner assembles a block. This means that nodes on the network can store the entire chain state really efficiently because all you need to know are the total coins in circulation, the UTXO set, and the kernels for each transaction.
I can’t do the whole thing justice in this tl;dr, so read the technical explanation here for more info if it piques your interest:
https://github.com/mimblewimble/grin/blob/master/doc/intro.m...