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Development on Litecoin’s upcoming privacy and scalability implementation, MimbleWimble, continues to be smooth and faces no potential delays ahead of a testnet launch later this month, the Litecoin Foundation confirmed in a release.
The. Litecoin MimbleWimble August update is here!https://t.co/zHY6O1TFAG
— Litecoin.com (@LitecoinDotCom) September 3, 2020
Litecoin made faster and more secure
For the uninitiated, MimbleWimble—a Harry Potter reference—was first proposed in 2016 to fill privacy lapses in the Bitcoin protocol. The latter gives away transactional information that allows firms like Chainalysis to tie transactions to an individual.
But last year, Litecoin founder Charlie Lee said better, and more confidential transactions were soon coming to Litecoin:
Fungibility is the only property of sound money that is missing from Bitcoin & Litecoin. Now that the scaling debate is behind us, the next battleground will be on fungibility and privacy.
I am now focused on making Litecoin more fungible by adding Confidential Transactions. 🚀
— Charlie Lee [LTC⚡] (@SatoshiLite) January 28, 2019
That said, privacy is not the only benefit of MimbleWimble. As project lead David Burkett stated in an update in August, the team was even building a new syncing process that would bring faster transactions on the Litecoin network — courtesy of an innovative block processing model.
On September 3, Burkett gave the community a quick update around where the development was headed.
“I was able to wrap up the Initial State Download, in particular the validation of the MWSTATE messages. There are still a number of ways where malicious peers can use these new messages to DoS nodes. I’m not yet guarding against all of those attacks, but there will be plenty of time to focus on that after the testnet is released,” said Burkett.
He also noted making changes to the code to make it “cleaner” and more strengthened ahead of the launch. The latter was “particularly around the management of the UTXO set,” or the collection of unspent coins.
Burkett further added:
“Everything is on track for a testnet release at the end of this month. I’m still figuring out a few final details, but I’ll share more information later this month about what the testnet will look like, and how everyone can get involved.”
Strong developments spurring institutional buying
It’s not only the Litecoin community; Institutional investors are taking notice of the potential benefits that MimbleWimble brings to Litecoin as a long-term cryptocurrency investment if recent institutional transactional data is considered.
As reported by CryptoSlate earlier this week, data from on-chain analytics firm Arcane Research showed Litecoin briefly traded at a 1,200% premium on Grayscale’s newly launched Litecoin trust. The occurrence also led some market observers to question if the broader cryptocurrency had indeed matured after the 2017 ICO mania.
Grayscale’s litecoin fund was briefly trading at a premium of over 1,200% on the underlying litecoin price, data produced by analysts at @ArcaneResearch showed. It’s now down to a mere 600% premium https://t.co/8rfQ1P92oH via @ForbesCrypto
— Billy Bambrough (@BillyBambrough) August 30, 2020
The Litecoin fund is a part of Grayscale’s crypto products meant for accredited investors to gain exposure to cryptocurrencies. They are collectively worth billions of dollars and can be traded on the open market as an over-the-counter product, similar to traditional stocks.
Litecoin currently trades at $49 as on September 5, down over 10% from September 4 after a broader sell-off in the crypto and equity markets.
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