Following its August progress update, the developer of Grin++ who has been working for several months with the founder of Litecoin, Charlie Lee and others, to design a Mimblewimble extension block has disclosed the date for the anticipated launch of the feature which is expected to bring confidential transactions (CT) and more fungible money to Litecoin users.

David Burkett says the first testnet would be launched on September 30 after they have been able to wrap up the Initial State Download, particularly the validation of the MWSTATE messages though malicious peers can still use these new messages to DoS nodes.

August Progress Update:

Nodes are able to sync and verify the initial state (similar to the Initial Block Download). Improved UTXO management logic.

Get ready for the first Mimblewimble testnet on LTC, launching September 30th! More details soon. https://t.co/DctJxUZHWg

— David Burkett ツ (@DavidBurkett38) September 3, 2020

Why Mimblewimble is cool

The output of the new CT feature, which is to help hide the amount being sent to any given address and, with coinjoin, allow for a significant privacy and fungibility improvements, is pretty big hence scales terribly, according to Burkett, but still have some improvements that make it scale better than Bitcoin and Litecoin. In his talk on the feature and others being worked on now to improve the network, Burkett explains on CryptoChat talk show how the heavy part of the range groups can be deleted once spent and users could still verify transactions without having to go through the history from the genesis block one after the other. He says:

“The really cool thing about Mimblewimble – and this is what makes it so great for scalability – is when a coin is spent, you delete it. So this is all is left onchain. You no longer need to know about that coin at all. So when you are doing your initial blockdown (initial syncing process) you won’t even get that coin. You won’t know anything about it. You won’t know it ever existed. You just get the unspent output (it’s called the UTXO). Because of that property alone, which is called cut through, this ends up scaling three or four or maybe five times better than Litecoin does in terms of chain size and initial blockdown load time. It’s way better at that and that’s even with confidential transactions which have those big heavy range groups I talked about.”

 

As an extension block, Mimblewimble implementation is optional for cryptocurrency exchanges since some countries may be against its use and exchanges in such jurisdictions would have to choose between not implementing the feature or to delist Litecoin from their traded coins. Burkett’s talk on the future directions of Mimblewimble also touched on how it requires interacting with the receiver to build a transaction collaboratively as well as highlighting the weaknesses of vanilla Mimblewimble and what the team is doing to try to solve it.

Amid speculations that the once elevated cryptocurrency will likely be displaced from the top 10 list of cryptocurrencies with the largest market cap, especially in this days of booming DeFi protocols, the planned feature testnet launch is the latest report to highlight progress on the Litecoin network. It was recently reported that Litecoin is now available on Revolut app in the U.S. where the cryptocurrency stands a chance to gain further exposure. Its Ballet Litecoin Block – a .999 silver 50g card designed to hold an entire Litecoin block reward – is also shipping to users who have shown interest.