Litecoin MimbleWimble July Summary Update

This update was written and provided by Litecoin MimbleWimble lead developer. David Burkett.

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coding

We moved away from writing new code to ensure that the MWEB codebase remains stable while auditors conduct reviews. Instead, I’ve been focusing on rebasing the changes from the LTC 0.18 branch to the LTC 0.21 branch.

For those of you unfamiliar with git terminology, this means we started with the code from the LTC 0.18 release (the latest at the time) and coded MWEB on top of it. However, with the LTC 0.21 release almost ready, LTC 0.18 is no longer the latest code. So, we’re merging the MWEB code we wrote into the LTC 0.21 codebase so that we can continue to use all the latest features, such as taproot, in MWEB releases. This is a very tedious and time-consuming manual process because code changes in LTC 0.21 may break changes made to support MWEB. These conflicts had to be resolved individually and carefully, which took a lot of time.

Fortunately, finally all node changes were merged and built successfully. I’m working on fixing a few failed tests and I’ll start doing the same for the wallet code. Once everything is completed and reviewed, we will be able to create a pre-release to test how the code will perform on mainnet. In particular, we will focus on communicating seamlessly with previous nodes, validating and propagating transactions and blocks, not prematurely enforcing MWEB rules before activation, and ensuring that valid blocks can be successfully mined.

Review and Audit

The team members developing Tari 12 were kind enough to take the time to provide a high-level review of the design and code. They provided the results here 14 and here 10 . In addition to uncovering a few potential issues, we’ve thoroughly documented our understanding of the changes, which may be a useful resource for others looking to learn about MWEB.

We also received a formal audit offer from Quarkslab. we are accepted(*), so they will officially start the audit in just a few days. The work is expected to be completed by mid-October when a report on all findings will be available. Once we fix any issues we find, we may make an official release (release number TBD).

(*) A thorough auditor like Quarkslab can make a big difference in the success of your project. Naturally, this means they can be quite expensive. “We accepted” means that Charlie accepted because he decided to generously pay for this audit. We are so lucky to have him around ❤️.

I’m taking a break this month due to personal reasons, so the updates are a little lighter than before. Things will return to normal next month. Thank you for your understanding.