What is Gridcoin?

If you've never heard of Gridcoin, it's a cryptocurrency that securely rewards BOINC computation (31 supported projects such as attempting to solve Cancer/AIDS/Ebola/Malaria, mapping the milkyway, folding proteins, cracking enigma codes, etc) on top of Proof of Stake. BOINC statistics are gathered directly from the project servers & all nodes agree on a daily superblock containing verified team statistics. More info on Gridcoin.

A Gridcoin MPA is coming to the Bitshares DEX you say?

Indeed, the Gridcoin community has created the "GRIDCOIN" Market Pegged Asset (MPA).

For those not familiar with Market Pegged Assets, no additional Gridcoin have been issued (I've not inflated the gridcoin coin supply).

Once the MPA goes live, we will potentially need to discard unnecessary permissions the creator of the MPA holds & perhaps re-evaluate the "Force settlement offset" and "Max force settle vol" values considering bitCNY has made the change and bitUSD is considering it.

Is the GRIDCOIN MPA live?

Negative, we are awaiting imminent integration into Xeroc's witness price feed script - it will be included in the next release.

Why are we interested in our own market pegged asset?

• We're interested in potentially distributing the GRIDCOIN MPA to participants of the Gridcoin Hangouts and potentially project raining (tipping) the asset onto Gridcoin users (or potentially all BOINC users) for completed BOINC computation in the future.
• We want to take advantage of the multiple benefits of the graphene blockchain and Bitshares Decentralised exchange as well as utilise the multiple upcoming projects such as BlockPay, Moonstone, Openledger and BlockPay's smartcoins wallet.

Have we established a bridge/gateway yet?

Not yet, we are currently investigating integration into CCEDK's Openledger to acquire an OPEN.GRC asset to act as our bridge onto the Bitshares DEX from the Gridcoin blockchain.

We're hopeful that there will be more bridge/gateway option in the future, but in the mean time we are patiently waiting for further news regarding how we can progress towards integration and the Gridcoin foundation proposal appears to be passing.

Conclusion

The Gridcoin community is looking forwards to the activation of the GRIDCOIN MPA & I personally believe the future of Bitshares (and all Bitshares related projects) is very positive.

I will post further updates once the MPA is live, then another once we have established our bridge/gateway onto the DEX.

Best regards,
CM.