On Monday, January 31, the Litecoin Foundation announced the much-awaited Mimblewimble upgrade coming to the Litecoin blockchain network. Lead developer David Burkett confirmed that the upgrade comes in the form of a Mimblewimble extension block (MWEB) officially released as an RC.
The implementation of MWEB will come along with the Litecoin Core 0.21.2 release candidate. This includes some of the major privacy and security enhancements with the Taproot upgrade.
Security and code auditing company Quarkslab released its audit of MWEB code which notes: “The protocol provides valuable new security enhancements about the privacy of transactions on the blockchain”. Speaking of this development, Litecoin creator Charlie Lee said:
“The planning, development and now activation of MWEB has been a true community effort, beginning with multiple years of donations from Litecoin supporters all over the world, and culminating with the dedication and attention to detail of David Burkett; who led the project.
It also involved key contributors like Andrew Yang who helped with the original Litecoin Improvement Proposal, Hector Chu’s essential code reviews, and the countless others who audited, advised, and ran testnet nodes. This project is a true testimony to the resiliency and continued growth of the Litecoin community”
Going Ahead With MWEB Activation
As the miners start receiving the Mimblewimble code, they will soon start with the signaling process with MWEB activation. Miners will use a ‘version filed’ among each block to vote for “soft” forks. They will also leverage a small part of this ‘version field’ to signal the MWEB activation.
Lead developer Burkett also said that upgrade will make Litecoin one of the most profound cryptocurrencies in the world. “MWEB is a crucial next step in Litecoin’s evolution. The optional confidentiality MWEB provides gives the user notable and needed protections for small everyday items, to salaries, or even buying a home”, he added.
The MWEB activation will bring the much-awaited privacy quotient to the users of Litecoin. However. the Litecoin Foundation stated that MWEB activation shall be optional. Meaning it will allow users to decide whether they need this kind of ‘privacy’ or not through an ‘opt-in’ feature.
The Litecoin (BTC) price has bounced by more than 5% following the news. As of press time, Litecoin is trading at $111 with a market cap of $7.7 billion. Will the MWEB activation help Litecoin (LTC) to reclaim its position in the top ten crypto-list?