The Litecoin development team has just announced that the code for Litecoin’s MimbleWimble privacy and security protocol is complete, and they are preparing for a formal audit.
Privacy and digital security are two qualities that are becoming increasingly important in the interconnected and globalized world in which we live, and developers of Litecoin (LTC) They know it. The cryptocurrency which was born to provide speed, quickness and economy in transactions, now also seeks to guarantee greater privacy and security to its users.
Recently, the Litecoin development team and the Litecoin Foundation announced officially that the protocol code MimbleWimble in Litecoin has been completed, so it is ready for a formal audit by other developers and the community, who will indicate the corrections needed for its grand launch.
Although it will still take a few weeks to see the official arrival of this protocol on mainnet, the completion of the code is a big step for this cryptocurrency. After the audits, MimbleWimble will be activated on the Litecoin mainnet, favoring the privacy, security and fungibility of this cryptocurrency; although its use will be optional for users and for cryptocurrency exchanges that operate with LTC.
Currently, Litecoin is the ninth most important cryptocurrency in the markets, with a value of $199 USD per unit and a market capitalization of 13.200 million dollars at the time of this edition.
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Better fungibility and privacy for Litecoin
As Litecoin developers explain, the arrival of the MimbleWimble protocol is an upgrade that is intended to improve and optimize the fungibility and privacy features within Litecoin. Thus, through MimbleWimble, Litecoin will be able to improve these qualities, while continuing to be a network blockchain lightweight, offering greater speed and scalability than Bitcoin and Ethereum figure.
The developers have been testing MimbleWimble on the Litecoin testnet since September of last year, and they claim that the protocol has been implemented and has worked optimally and without problems within this network. With these tests offering a positive experience for the developers, the next step is the formal verification of said code through an audit, and its activation on the mainnet, an activation of which there is still no exact date, everything indicates that the update will arrive through a soft fork to the network. Additionally, all the details of the update can be found in the LIP-0003 (Litecoin Improvements Proposals, or Litecoin Improvement Proposal)
Mimblewimble Extension Block (MWEB)
The update that the developers had been preparing for some time, and which they called Mimblewimble Extension Block (MWEB), seeks to make LTC, the blockchain cryptocurrency, an asset with the same properties as physical money. In his article, “The Battle for Sound Money”, the Litecoin Foundation explains that the single biggest weakness of cryptocurrencies against fiat money is the fungibility. An essential quality of money that some of the most widely used cryptoassets fail at.
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As explained in previous articles, the transparency offered by blockchain technology means that certain cryptocurrencies, such as BTC, ETH and LTC, can be marked or labeled as “tainted” if, for example, they have been involved in an illicit transaction. Thus, being able to label them reduces the fungibility of cryptocurrencies, since it prevents, for example, a marked LTC from looking the same and being interchangeable with another LTC.
In fiat money, although much of the world's issuance has been involved in some illegal act, it is quite difficult, though not impossible, to recognize which banknote was misused and which was not. This is the feature that MimbleWimble seeks to implement in Litecoin.
Combining Confidential Transactions with CoinJoin
Litecoin implements, almost literally, the concept of MimbleWimble from JK Rowling’s famous Harry Potter literary series. MimbleWimble is the “tongue-tying” curse in Harry Potter, where the enemy was confused into saying incoherent things. Litecoin implements this “spell” to hide and obfuscate transaction amounts, and prevent LTC from being flagged as “tainted” and user funds from being locked up on some centralized exchange.
To achieve this, MimbleWimble combines different security and privacy technologies, such as Confidential Transactions, which help to hide transaction amounts, and the coinjo, a cryptocurrency mixer that obfuscates the origin and destination of each cryptocurrency.
On the other hand, MWEB is implemented as a parallel chain to the Litecoin mainnet, the use of which is optional for users. The developers also clarify that although this update promises to give Litecoin a high level of privacy and security, tracking nodes may be able to detect and link certain transactions. Still, MimbleWimble remains an attractive option to ensure greater privacy, fungibility and scalability in the protocol.
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