The development has officially begun on Litecoin’s implementation of Mimblewimble extension blocks, a feature that will bring confidentiality to the sixth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.
The news comes nearly a year after Litecoin creator Charlie Lee announced the intention to improve LTC’s fungibility by enabling confidential transactions, and a month after the Litecoin Foundation began accepting donations to support the effort.
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
Burkett, the Grin developer tasked with implementing privacy features in LTC, stated on the project’s “Progress Update Thread” he spent December reorganizing the code that will be shared between Litecoin and Grin++, a Grin node client that will interact with the Litecoin protocol to enable opt-in confidential transactions.
The developer also linked to two GitHub repositories, “libmw-core” and “libmw-ltc,” and advised that the technically-inclined can follow along as he makes updates.
A quarter of the way there
In December, the Litecoin Foundation announced a crowdfunding campaign to provide David Burkett with enough funds to support a year’s worth of work on the project. That figure was set at $72,000, and the Litecoin Foundation pitched in $5,450 worth of LTC and BTC to kick off the effort.
A month later, the crowdfund is a quarter of the way to meeting its target, having drawn about $9,500 worth of LTC and $100 worth of BTC contributions from donors, which added to the foundation’s contributions will provide Burkett with just under three months’ worth of runway (at $6,000 per month). Lee has once again called on the Litecoin community to chip in:
Here’s the December update on MimbleWimble on Litecoin by @DavidBurkett38: https://t.co/wbmcQJEcDQ
Fundraising for the Litecoin Confidential Transaction Fund is going strong. We are 1/4 of the way there. But we still need your help #LitecoinFam. Thanks! https://t.co/lHZE1ipGtn pic.twitter.com/iDoGlp3vMG
— Charlie Lee [LTC⚡] (@SatoshiLite) December 30, 2019
A number of users responded positively to Lee’s request, and yet many claimed the Litecoin founder — who controversially sold an estimated $200 million worth of LTC at or near the coin’s all-time high — should fund the entire project.
Litecoin, currently ranked #6 by market cap, is down 0.65% over the past 24 hours. LTC has a market cap of $2.66B with a 24 hour volume of $2.76B.
Litecoin Price Chart
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