Litecoin MimbleWimble September Update: Testnet Launches!
Testnet is here. So far, there are only a few nodes connected and mining, and there haven’t been enough blocks to activate mimblewimble yet (we’re using BIP9-style activation1). As more peers connect and start to mine, I’m hoping we can get the chain moving fast enough to activate in a day or so, but time will tell.
I’m still roughing in very minimal cli wallet support, but hopefully we’ll have a simple way to create mimblewimble transactions by the time it activates. For technical users who aren’t afraid of CLIs, and are willing to build the code themselves, I encourage you to join in on the fun by going to https://t.me/MWEB_Testnet 9.
The new home for the code is at https://github.com/ltc-mweb 8. For those of you unaware, MWEB is now the new official acronym for “Mimblewimble Extension Block.” It’s so super official, that we’ve got an awesome logo and everything! Check it out: https://twitter.com/SatoshiLite/status/1311376460158955521 19.
Going Forward:
Now that the MWEB testnet is running, I’m going to focus on ways to make it easy for non-technical litecoin users to start testing it out as well. This means improving the automated builds, better documentation, and starting to build out wallet support.
Right now, there are a number of areas in the code that are fragile or lack the necessary validation around edge cases, so I’ll also be taking some time this month to harden the code, and start validating any remaining consensus rules we missed. Once I’m confident everything is working as designed, I’ll start looking for ways to break the testnet, to make sure we find and resolve any security or stability weaknesses.
Next month, I’ll share a detailed plan of all of the remaining work necessary to get MWEB merged to the main repo, so that miners and node operators can start signaling for activation sometime in 2021!
1(https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BIP_0009)
This update was written by the Litecoin MimbleWimble lead developer David Burkett and published on Litecoin.com
