Litecoin Collaborates With Beam Privacy For Mimblewimble Implementation

The team behind Beam Privacy has recently announced on an interesting implementation of Mimblewimble as Extensions Blocks into Litecoin. What it means is that once applied, conversion from LTC to LTC-MW and back will be possible. It’s important to mention that the implementation is an extension of Litecoin’s first layer, not a sidechain.

The research and development process will be quite long and subject to extensive peer review. The outcome may also improve the Mimblewimble implementation in Beam assuming relevant improvements will be found during the collaboration.

The implementation will be an open source and with a permissive license. In the future, Beam expects that other coins decide to integrate to it as well, especially if they are a fork of Bitcoin, which is easier to integrate.

Looking For Future Implementations

The fact that the Litecoin Foundation agreed to work with Beam is a testimony to their support of Mimblewimble. Improving the fungibility and privacy in crypto in general, not limited to Beam, are aligned with the team’s goal:

“We believe that Beam’s implementation of Mimblewimble and Litecoin, in general, will be better due to the collaboration and peer review process.”, as reported by Beam’s Keyser Söze Guy Corem, “It will take probably over a year to implement, and a lot of high-caliber open source devs will review it.”

If Mimblewimble is available on Litecoin, won’t it make Beam unneeded and redundant?

“Beam isn’t a one trick pony, as according to its roadmap here. We are planning to upgrade layer1, implement LN, Confidential Assets, opt-in Compliance features and make Beam one of the most used crypto for real-world applications and use cases.”

Charlie Lee, the creator of Litecoin, had recently tweeted:

Team has been chatting with the @vcorem and @beamprivacy team about MimbleWimble on Litecoin with Extension Blks. Pleasantly surprised that Beam has already implemented switch-commitments w/ ElGamal. It’s a safety switch to protect against quantum computing breaking CT soundness.

— Charlie Lee [LTC⚡] (@SatoshiLite) February 6, 2019

Beam Privacy is a new cryptocurrency built on the Mimblewimble protocol. The last focuses on privacy, fungibility, and scalability. Beam has recently started trading and gained popularity, together with Grin Privacy project.