The Litecoin Project, has announced it is working with David Burkett, a Grin++ developer, to add MimbleWimble support to the Litecoin network. Litecoin Founder and Executive Director of the Litecoin Foundation Charlie Lee, made the announcement via twitter saying:
Updates on MimbleWimble progress: @davidburkett38, the main developer of Grin++, is now working with @ecurrencyhodler and I on the design. We’ve been ironing out the mechanism of getting LTC in and out of MW/EB. Also figured out how to handle MW fees in a clean way.
MimbleWimble (MW) is a protocol change that enables a handful of benefits, most notably confidential transactions (CT) and non interactive coin joins. Those who opt in to use MW on Litecoin would have their transaction values hidden and be mixed among other network participants, making it harder for third parties to track and log activity.
Grin++ is a fork of Grin the original MimbleWimble protocol. It has, according to the projects github, a heavier focus on security, speed, reliability, modularity and scalability alongside the main upstream branch.
MW would provide a more comprehensive fix to the fungabilty problem than CT alone, something Lee views as the only property of sound money that is missing from Bitcoin & Litecoin. By jumping into MW it appears the team are looking to kill two birds with one stone and by utilising extension blocks (EB) we would also see a network capacity increase but it is not certain how high the team will set this.
Burkett pro-actively reached out offering his services following conversations over slow MW progress. He responded to the announcement by thanking Lee and stating that his was looking forward to working together to bring financial privacy to all. He further went on to write his own blog post clarifying his intentions behind the collaboration stating:
I’m just a crypto-anarchist who happens to spend his spare time developing an alternative node and wallet for Grin. My ultimate goal is financial privacy for everyone, and I would love nothing more than to see mimblewimble on Bitcoin itself. Getting MW added to Litecoin seemed like the obvious next step.
Lee in return for Burkett’s work has provided a 1.5BTC donation to the Grin++ security audit as a show of support and thanks to those developers pioneering the MimbleWimble protocol.
