The first CBR block
The cryptocurrency Gridcoin switched from a interest based proof of stake protocol to constant block rewards on block 1420001 which was created on 2018-11-06 12:04:32.
If you want to read up on CBR I suggst you reading this.
Reasons behind CBR
The goal of switching to constant block rewards was to make the network more secure by bringing whales online and thus rising the network difficulty. This makes the network more secure and it is far more expensive to make a 51 % percent attack on Gridcoin.
Actually you need more than 51 % percent of all coins that are staking because every UTXO has a 16h cooldown after you staked with it. And you need a series of blocks minted by the same actor to have a successful 51 % attack.
The difficulty now
When we take a quick look at the difficulty graph from gridcoin.ch
we see that the difficulty is averaging at 9. Sadly I don't have a graphics at the moment from before the switch to CBR but I remember seeing difficulties from 2 and even lower. Now I sometimes see difficulties from over 20!
I'd say most of the older users would agree with me that the difficulty was much lower then.
Conclusion
The overall goal of the switch to CBR was to bring more coins online and make the network more secure!
In my humble opinion this mission can now safely be called a success and I'm looking forward to the next step we a s a community take =)