Litecoin MimbleWimble April Update

Another month has passed since 2020 is upon us and a new update on the Litecoin MimbleWimble (MW) proposal has been published, so let’s dive in.

Burkett, the project’s lead developer, reported in his latest blog post that he had “built a functional testing framework to build valid headers, blocks, and transactions.” This is “(mainly) a complete end-to-block verification test”.

As the name suggests, steps have also been taken to integrate the work done so far within the Litecoin codebase, starting with the ConnectBlock logic.

“This is the part that verifies blocks to ensure that valid UTXOs are being used, that there are no double spends, etc. It is also responsible for actually adding blocks to the chain.”

Because this work is just beginning, it hasn’t been published yet. As Burkett writes, he aims to have it publicly available on GitHub by next month, in time for MW’s May update.

“I haven’t created a repository for this part yet, but I’ll try to publish it on Github in the coming weeks once I have a chance to clean up the code a bit.”

Burkett is hesitant about what’s next after ConnectBlock, but did make it clear in May that it will primarily involve “continuing integration with the LTC codebase and more testing.” For Grin++, the team has just released its first non-beta release candidate, called v1.0.0, which is a big step forward for protocol stability.