The donation, revealed through a tweet by Grin, was carried out through cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase. In a forum post, Grin developer Daniel Lehnberg informed that the cryptocurrencies were donated by an anonymous person.
Lehnberg has disclosed that he communicated with the donor for a short period of time. A condensed statement was made by Lehnberg reflecting the opinion of the donor, who wish to remain anonymous:
“Our motives are not economical! It’s about the technology and the protocol. Please put it to good use for the development of GRIN. You keep working as you did in the past […] This is what we are honouring right now with these donations so that you can work freely […] without economic dependencies.”
Some media outlets jumped into conclusion that Bitcoin’s unidentified inventor, Satoshi Nakomoto, was behind the donation, even though there are various means to track such a big remittance.
The rumor was initially spread through a Telegram group chat message on the basis of a message from Litecoin (LTC) creator Charlie Lee’s revelation that the remitted Bitcoin had been mined in 2010 and sent from a wallet which remained idle for nearly 9 years.
Later on, Lee retracted by saying that the message was “just a joke.” Grin is a privacy token that employs scalability and privacy oriented Mimblewimble protocol, a name inspired by Harry Potter novel.
Mimblewimble is basically a modified version of the cryptographic covenant known as Confidential Transactions, which permits for trades to be jumbled yet confirmable in order to attain both top level anonymity and prohibition of double-spending.
Earlier this year, Grin completed a hard fork, the first for the network since its launch in mid-January 2019 to unveil changes to its consensus algo in order to attain greater resistance to ASIC miners.
In October 2019, the Litecoin Foundation released two new draft improvement conceptions structured to function towards setting up privacy features for the network by incorporating Mimblewimble.