Yesterday the Litecoin Foundation, a Singapore based non profit headed by the projects founder Charlie Lee, announced it was starting up a dedicated fund to fund development of confidential transactions on the Litecoin Network.

The post which was submitted to the LitecoinTalk forums (also ran by the foundation), states the donations raised from the community for this fund will go towards sponsoring David Burkett to implement the changes into Litecoin. Burkett is the lead developer on the Litecoin Extension block MimbleWimble (EB MW) proposal and developer of Grin++ a C++ implementation of the MW protocol.

“The plan is for David to work 30 hours a week. This will be split into 15 hours for Grin++ and 15 hours for MimbleWimble via Extension Blocks. We believe that this will be a mutually beneficial arrangement because Grin++ code will eventually be forked onto Litecoin’s Extension Block. Therefore any development in Grin++ will be immediately beneficial to Litecoin.”

Furthermore it is explained that an area of concern remains keeping consistency with the bitcoin core codebase upstream where Litecoin Core pulls a majority of its code from. As such the post describes how additional resources will be required to ensure these merges can still occur smoothly and the two don’t drift too far apart.

The org has, as of writing, raised just over $5,000 in Bitcoin and Litecoin from 21 donators in the first couple of days, 4 of whom have donated over Ł100 comprising ~90% of the total value, one donating Ł52. Litecoin Developer, Loshan too has publicly stated he has given to the fund in his own tweet as well as encouraging others.

“The goal of this proposal is to raise $6,000 per month for 12 months for David Burkett for a total of $72,000. The funds will be held in an escrow account held by the Litecoin Foundation and will be released evenly each month after David Burkett releases his progress update and code repositories. If the total goal is not raised within the first month, then the BTC/LTC amount needed to fund the remaining USD balance will be updated according to the asset prices of Bitcoin and Litecoin at that given time.”

While it is not clear what will happen if the goal isn’t met in full, Charlie Lee has generously stepped forward to match the amount raised each month in order to provide additional support, writing in a tweet.