Litecoin’s Funds For MimbleWimble Are Getting Short: Report

Litecoin’s funds for the mimblewimble development are getting short, one month prior to the launch but the development continues. How will the foundation manage to find more money? Let’s try and find out in the latest Litecoin news.

Litecoin’s funds are getting short as the Developer David Burkett continued developing the MimbleWimble privacy features this month. The project should arrive on Litecoin’s testnet in late September and gathered $48,000 but needs to raise $72,000 in total. Burkett shared an update on his work to implement MimleWimble to Litecoin as the upcoming feature will introduce private transactions for all LTC users.

We only have $3000 remaining for August – half of what's needed. The privacy and scalability provided by MW will go a long way toward making LTC more cash-like, and should put it ahead of its competition. Please contribute what you can to help make this effort a success.🙏

— David Burkett ツ (@DavidBurkett38) August 2, 2020

This month, Burkett focused implementing Initial Block Downloads whereas most other blockchains required full nodes to download many gigabytes of data related to past transactions so with the MimbleWimble protocol, a lot less data will be required:

“The biggest innovation behind mimblewimble is that, in order to verify the chain, you will have to know the “chain state.” Since we don’t want to require everyone to download all old mimblewimble blocks or to know about all old spent outputs, we use different structure to commit to the transactions.”

MimbleWimble is a blockchain protocol, not being a blockchain itself. The dynamic allows projects such as Litecoin to integrate it within their own existing blockchain fairly easily. Burkett is also working on Grin++ which is a client for another MimbleWimble coin, which required an enormous amount of effort which caused delays in the LTC work.  Burkett says that Grin++ is now in maintenance mode and that this should be the last time this interferes with the LTC progress.

Litecoin started developing its mimblewimble implementation in January as Burkett updated previously, saying that the testnet launch will take place in mid-September. This month new pushes the testnet launch to the end of September. Burkett didn’t estimate a date for the mainnet launch which will deliver private transactions to the general public. He also noted that with a project this large, things rarely go as planned so he plans to spend extra time on code cleanup. The privacy features of MimbleWimble are near completion but the project is still short on funding. About 1000 LTC were donated to the project so far and community members have donated 500 LTC independently.