Litecoin's MimbleWimble Testnet Could Come as Soon as September

Key highlights:

• Litecoin is progressing towards an implementation of the MimbleWimble blockchain privacy protocol
• The first MimbleWimble-powered Litecoin testnet could come as soon as September
• The Litecoin project started exploring MimbleWimble in early 2019

We could see Litecoin's first MimbleWimble-powered testnet in September

Litecoin developers are making progress on their project to implement the MimbleWimble privacy technology into the Litecoin protocol. Developer David Burkett discussed Litecoin’s path towards MimbleWimble in a post on Litecoin.com. 

Burkett says the first testnet launch of MimbleWimble on Litecoin could come as soon as September if everything goes according to plan: 

“When developing projects this large, things rarely go exactly as planned, so the design changes over time. Having a chance like this to go back through the code and clean things up, re-evaluate decisions made, etc. will really pay off in terms of code quality, hopefully allowing for a smooth first testnet launch at the end of September.”

MimbleWimble is a blockchain protocol designed to make crypto assets fungible and improve the privacy of cryptocurrency transactions. MimbleWimble was first proposed in 2016 and it was first implemented by Grin, a cryptocurrency that went live in early 2019. Another example of a cryptocurrency that leverages MimbleWimble is BEAM. 

Litecoin's path towards privacy

Indeed, the Litecoin Foundation started exploring MimbleWimble already in February of 2019 after teaming up with the BEAM project. In September of 2019, the Litecoin project commissioned David Burkett to realize the vision of bringing MimbleWimble to Litecoin. Burkett is also a developer of Grin++, a wallet for the Grin cryptocurrency.

Litecoin founder Charlie Lee has previously stated that the reason why he wants to bring privacy-enhancing feature to Litecoin is that the lack of fungibility is the only property of sound money that’s missing from Litecoin and Bitcoin. 

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

If MimbleWimble is a success on Litecoin, it could potentially pave the way for a MimbleWimble implementation on Bitcoin as well. For example, SegWit was first activated on Litecoin and eventually made its way to Bitcoin after the technology proved itself on Litecoin. However, even SegWit generated plenty of controversy, so a more radical change such as a MimbleWimble implementation would likely create even more strife within the Bitcoin community.