Litecoin’s MimbleWimble Gears Up For Initial Block Download

As September is near approaching, Grin++ developer, David Burkett has been working hard towards the implementation of MimbleWimble in Litecoin. The developer recently updated the community about the progress of MW in June. 

MimbleWimble On The Right Track For Testnet Release In September

Recently, the Litecoin network was in the news for adjusting its mining difficulty from 7,906,110 to 9,479,960. Apart from this, the Litecoin network seems to be keeping everything low-key. However, the implementation of MimbleWimble on the network is still underway. Litecoin’s team is eyeing the implementation of the MimbleWimble [MW] protocol as well as the extension blocks in order to address the privacy and scalability hurdles that the network is facing.

While the MimbleWimble phrase from Harry Potter is a tongue-tying curse, the Litecoin community feared that the MW protocol could tie Litecoin as a privacy coin. However, Litecoin’s creator Charlie Lee shed light on the same and has been clearing FUD around the MW implementation. In more recent updates, David Burkett, Grin++, and Litecoin developer elaborated on the updates pertaining to the MW implementation for the month of June.

The Litecoin Foundation took to Twitter to reveal the June update to the community. The tweet read,

Want to know the latest with Mimbelwimble implementation on #Litecoin? Check out the below thread from David Burkett for June's update. https://t.co/9S8MQYWdnr

— Litecoin Foundation (@LTCFoundation) July 1, 2020

Burkett, in the blog post, pointed out that the current LTC mempool logic was more complex than he had expected. Therefore, this would have to be rekindled after the testnet launches in September. However, a minimal implementation for the execution of MW transactions was formulated by Burkett for the time being. Apart from this, a code was written to aid the mining of extension blocks.

Furthermore, addressing the idea of separate databases, Burkett suggested that having different databases was a bad approach since they could become out of sync considering the loss of the capability to execute atomic updates. Additionally, this could pave the way to attackers exploiting the network. Burkett reportedly invested time in modifying the code for “serializing and deserializing” the blocks. He further highlighted,

“I was able to take advantage of the groundwork that was laid down as part of the segwit enhancement, to cleanly support serializing the additional data without making major changes to the existing block storage format. As a result, upgraded nodes can successfully save extension block data to disk the same place they’ve always saved blocks, without having to introduce an additional database.”

Burkett is said to be looking into initial block download in July, as per the preplanned agenda for the implementation of MW. August will focus on chain reorg logic and September will eye at activation logic and testnet launch.