Litecoin MimbleWimble January Development Update.

David Burkett, project leader of the Litecoin MimbleWimble (MW) proposal, announced the January update in a blog update. The most notable things discussed were the introduction of non-interactive transactions within MW that were not possible before and the introduction of solutions to key UX obstacles, opening up more opportunities going forward.

“The biggest challenge when using MW is that the sender and receiver must communicate. This requires the recipient to be online when sending. My proposal, with an updated version of the article coming soon, eliminates that need. This removes major UX hurdles, limits long-term maintenance requirements, and makes it easier to support hardware wallets by supporting receipt over cold storage.”

As for development, Burkett reports that ‘the build process has been decided’ for libmw and that local builds are currently working. libmw is a partially redesigned version of Grin++ and a proposed design for MW within Litecoin.

“We have also built a robust database framework with transaction capabilities supporting atomic updates across multiple tables, implemented coin-agnostic block database queries and updates, and have been partially tested using LTC-specific headers and blocks. Model.”

Additional findings emerged from the recent Grin++ security audit, paid for in part by Litecoin creator Charlie Lee, Burkett reported. Burkett stated that he has ‘applied all fixes to Grin++ and libmw and will be awaiting final review from our auditors’, but it does not appear to have been published publicly yet, along with other audits that can be found on the Github project.

“This audit was a humbling lesson in how complex C++ really is. I learned a ton as part of the process, and the Grin++ and libmw codebases are much better as a result.”

A planned hard fork update was successfully implemented on the Grin++ network this month as well. As a result, several issues, including synchronization issues, were finally resolved, making this the ‘most stable release yet’. Burkett hopes this will allow him and his team to focus more effort and time on ‘actual development’ rather than putting out fires due to issues raised across support channels, thus leading to ‘a faster pace of development in the coming months.’ ‘I look forward to it.

“Our priority for February is to implement consensus rules for LTC EB, including all verification and full testing. This is the most important part of the code, so it takes a lot of time to make sure all the details are correct and that the code has full test coverage. Once complete, we can work on the API for extension blocks to integrate libmw into the existing LTC codebase.” “We will also focus on thoroughly reviewing new unilateral tx proposals, and if no major security issues are found, we will create a LIP for community feedback.”

Burkett is a publicly funded developer working on the Litecoin Core Project. All financing along with links to support his work can be found here.