David Burkett has released a new Litecoin MimbleWimble development update.

David Burkett, lead developer of the proposal to integrate MimbleWimble (MW) into the Litecoin network, just published an update on the team’s development progress in a blog post on litecointalk.io.

In the post, Burkett explains how his team has been working over the past few months to design MW Extension Blocks (EBs) to provide Litecoin users with “secret transactions and more fungible money.” Burkett first got involved with Litecoin in August of this year, and he indicated that his solo work had been completed before he was contacted.

Following his speech at the Litecoin Summit in Las Vegas where he shared details about the two most recent LIPs, he appears to have reached an agreement with the foundation on next steps.

“The first big announcement is that the LTC Foundation has decided to fund my efforts to implement the MW expansion block and continue the Grin++ work! More details on this will be announced soon, but we thank everyone for the opportunity.”

Burkett also reports successfully completing a TOR (Onion Routing) Grin++ payment, providing another level of privacy on top of standard native transactions with MW CoinJoin before the broadcast.

Currently, with MW Coin Join, all transactions are made public before they are joined. This means that anyone with the appropriate know-how and resources can track participant interactions. Introducing pre-broadcast subscriptions hides this process from the public, but introduces a trusted third party in the form of CoinJoin servers into the equation who can later sell this data.

If these servers become an acceptable solution in the market, a market for higher transaction fees may emerge in the future to better incentivize these servers.

Burkett details his work on Litecoin and how he set out to bridge the gap between the two projects.

“On the LTC side, we started by familiarizing ourselves with the existing code by completing LTC development training sessions. This meant starting with the latest Bitcoin source and making whatever modifications were necessary to keep it in sync.”

Burkett has now begun work on redesigning the Grin++ codebase to allow Litecoin to reuse aspects of the codebase with ‘minimal modifications.’ This is something he describes as beyond the scope of this update and is a topic that will be discussed more formally and in more detail. We’ll keep you posted with additional articles over the coming weeks.

As part of our funding agreement, we appear to be committing to monthly updates going forward to keep interested parties interested in development progress and to support communication and transparency.

“We will provide monthly progress updates to keep everyone informed of progress. It’s probably going to be a lot more concise than this update, but I thought it would be good to spend a few more minutes with this first update letting everyone know who I am and where I am and setting expectations for the future. .”