David Burkett, the project lead for the Litecoin MimbleWimble (MW) proposal, yesterday released his February update, providing further insights on the aforementioned non-interactive transaction proposal published in January. Burkett reports he has iterated through a few design structures and has finally arrived at a design which resolves the issues outlined in his initial write up:

“I believe we’ve finally got a design that resolves the issues found with the first write-up, and I’ve turned that into a LIP (https://github.com/litecoin-project/lips/pull/13 8). I suspect it will still take some time before the LIP has had sufficient review to be considered safe enough to accept, but I’ll continue to keep one-sided transactions in mind as I develop.”

Alongside the publication of this new Litecoin Improvement Proposal (LIP), Burkett mentions good progress has been made on validation rules, although he is cautious, making it clear there is still much work to be done in this area. Headway has also been made to the kernel design with new modifications introduced that ‘‘support the ability to soft-fork in new features in the future’’.

“I’ve also started to build out the merkle mountain ranges (MMRs), which are a data structure we use to commit to kernels & outputs. Once the MMR logic is finished, I should be able to get back to the block validation logic. I didn’t get to work on the Node API like I had hoped, but that’s something I also expect to get to next month.”

Burkett furthermore writes about how he is hesitant to provide concrete deadlines for submissions as in his own words:

“…writing blockchain software is difficult, time-consuming, and unpredictable at times. I didn’t want artificial deadlines to force us to rush through parts of the code and introduce defects or security vulnerabilities.

Despite saying this however, Burkett believes ‘it’s finally time to commit to the first major event’. He also shares that he is aiming to achieve a MW testnet launch by the end of summer, which will include ‘all block & tx validation rules, basic p2p messaging, transaction pool, syncing, and the ability to mine blocks’. Burkett is clear that this ‘will NOT include a usable GUI wallet for casual users to test it out’ and that ‘transactions will likely need to be created manually at first, or via a cli or automated tool’.

Burkett is a publicly funded developer working on the Litecoin Core Project, all finances along with links to support his work can be found here.