David Burkett, the lead developer on the proposal to integrate MimbleWimble (MW) onto the Litecoin network has just released an update regarding the teams development progress in a blog post on litecointalk.io.

In the post Burkett describes how he an his team have been working over the last several months to design a MW extension block (EB) in order to provide Litecoin users with “confidential transactions and more fungible money”. Burkett first got involved with Litecoin in August of this year suggesting solitary work has been done prior to reaching out.

Following on from his speech at the Litecoin Summit in Vegas, where he shared more details into the two most recent LIPs, it appears he has come to an agreement with the foundation on the next steps forward, stating:

“The first big announcement is that the LTC Foundation has graciously decided to fund my efforts to implement the MW extension block, and to continue working on Grin++! More details about that will be announced shortly, but I want to thank you all for the opportunity.”

In addition Burkett reports that he has successfully completed an onion routed (TOR) Grin++ payment, providing another level of privacy on top of a standard base transaction along with a pre-broadcast MW CoinJoin.

Currently with MW coinjoins all transactions are public before becoming joined, this means anyone with adequate knowhow and resources can track participant interactions. By introducing pre-broadcast joining it hides this process from the public, it does however introduce a trusted third party in the form of a coinjoin server into the equation which may later sell this data.

We may see a higher transaction fee market emerge in order to better incentivise these servers in the future if they become an acceptable solution to the market.

Burkett further discusses his work on Litecoin and how he is beginning to bridge the gap between the two projects writing:

“On the LTC side, I started by familiarizing myself with the existing code by completing the LTC Dev Training Session. This meant starting with the latest bitcoin source, and making all modifications necessary to get it to sync.”

Burkett has now begun work on re-designing the Grin++ codebase to allow Litecoin to re-use aspects of it with ‘minimal modifications’, something he describes as beyond the scope of this update and a topic he will discuss more formally and in more detail over the coming weeks in a further article.

As part of the funding agreement it seems we are also promised monthly updates going forward to keep those interested afloat of development progress and aid in communication and transparency.

“I will be providing monthly progress updates to keep everyone in the loop on what progress has been made. They’ll likely be much more succinct than this one, but I thought it would be good to take a few extra minutes with this first update to let everyone know who I am, where we’re at, and set some expectations for the future.”