Litecoin development news has been lacking recently, with all of the attention focused on Ethereum’s ongoing testing of Beacon Chain. That has changed with the recent launch of the MimbleWimble (MW) testnet.
As it has only just gone live, there are a few nodes connected and mining, the official blog post stated. The MW protocol will be activated when there are enough participants on the testnet which the team hopes will be in a couple of days.
Mimblewimble, named after a fictional Harry Potter spell, uses ‘confidential transactions’ which allows senders to encrypt the number of coins to be sent using ‘blinding factors’ while obfuscating the addresses. This vastly improves the privacy of the blockchain while also enhancing its scalability.
The testnet has been called MWEB, which is the new official acronym for ‘MimbleWimble Extension Block.’ Lead developer David Burkett, who penned the announcement, added that he wants to make it easy for non-technical Litecoin users to join in the testing.
The code will be ‘hardened’ in the next month, he added, to fix any issues and ensure consensus rules are infallible. Then comes a period of stress testing where coders attempt to ‘break’ the testnet to make sure they find and resolve any security or stability weaknesses.
Fungibility, scalability, and privacy have been the key issues that founder Charlie Lee has been focused on for the past 18 months or so. As reported by CryptoPotato back in July, the development of this testnet has been ongoing for most of this year.
Lee posted the new MWEB logo a few days ago to mark the long-awaited launch.
In a related development, LTC Foundation project director, David Schwartz, polled the crypto community regarding a potential ‘velvet fork’ to enable smart contract capability and interoperability with other blockchains such as Cardano. Almost 43% of respondents were in agreement if it benefitted Litecoin.
Litecoin prices have been pretty lackluster recently, and it is just clinging on to its top ten position in terms of market capitalization, which is $3 billion. LTC is trading flat on the day at around $46.50 at the time of writing but has gained 3% since the same time last week.
The silver to Bitcoin’s gold hit a 2020 high of just under $70 in mid-August but has fallen back substantially since then, and has moved very little over the past month, hovering around long-term price levels in the mid-$40 zone.