On numerous instances, Charlie Lee, the Litecoin Foundation Founder and Director, has alluded to plans to add Confidential Transactions to Litecoin through soft-fork. According to the director, fungibility is the only lacking property for Litecoin and Bitcoin. Therefore adding confidential transactions will make Litecoin fungible.
Implementation of Mimblewimble
Recently Beam Privacy announced the implementation of Mimblewimble into Litecoin as Extension Blocks. The implementation will make possible the conversion of LTC to LTC-MW and vice versa. In one of his tweets, the Litecoin Foundation Director informed the crypto and Litecoin community that they have been having discussions with the Beam Privacy team about adding Confidential Transactions. He added that the blockchain is exploring the possibility of having bulletproof Mimblewimble Extension Blocks.
Research and development will be an extensive process subject to peer review. The results will improve the implementation of Mimblewimble in Beam with improvements expected during the collaboration. Implementation is likely to be an open source and it will have permissive licenses. Beam Privacy is looking forward to other cryptocurrencies to integrate it mores so if they are soft-fork which is much easier to integrate.
The future of Mimblewimble
Beam’s Keyser Soze stated that the implementation of Mimblewimble by Litecoin is a great step and it will take about a year to complete implementation subject to review from high caliber developers. The implementation of Mimblewimble by Litecoin will not render Beam redundant because there are plans to implement LN, upgrade layer1 as well as opt-in Compliance features t5hus making Beam the most used convenient blockchain.
Mimblewimble enhances transacting without exposing personal information and in crypto normally sender’s and receiver’s addresses, as well as the amount, are exposed. What Mimblewimble does is to hide the transaction amount through multiplication of the amount with an exaggerated value known to receiver and sender. It is an ideal way of carrying out Confidential Transactions by obfuscating the amount one is sending over the network.
The Mimblewimble protocol is currently employed by Beam Privacy which is a relatively new Crypto. Beam commenced trading and is popular for its Grin Privacy project.
