Litecoin (LTC), popularly known as silver to Bitcoin’s gold, has spent several years now without attracting a lot of attention to itself. The coin still has a large and loyal community that managed to keep it relatively high on the list of largest coins by market cap, but for the most part of the last few years, LTC has been working on developing its Mimblewimble upgrade, which left little room for other kinds of distractions.
Now, two years later, Mimblewimble is finally ready for launch, which is expected to grant the Litecoin network and its users a lot more privacy-oriented transactions.
According to the project, Mimblewimble will enter the Litecoin network by way of the Mimblewimble Extension Block, or MWEB. This is a block that allows the users to opt-in to confidential transactions. David Burkett, who acts as the lead developer for MWEB, said that the upgrade will significantly improve the coin’s viability as a fungible currency, suitable for everyday transactions.
Apart from simple everyday payments, users can also expect a number of other use cases, such as paying employee salaries, buying land and property, and more.
The history of Mimblewimble
As many in the Litecoin community already know, the name “mimblewimble” came from a tongue-tying spell that made its appearance in the Harry Potter books. The project decided to adopt it, and create a protocol with a confidentiality feature that lets users hide their transaction details in order to achieve increased privacy. In addition, the protocol also offers a framework for other blockchains to improve the usability of their own digital coins.
Originally, Litecoin first started talking about the Mimblewimble integration back in October 2019, in a pair of improvement proposals. Only one year later, the network launched its first Mimblewimble testnet, in October 2020. Things would have likely moved even faster if not for unexpected low community participation. But, while it did take a while, things were happening for Litecoin and Mimblewimble.
Another unfortunate circumstance was that European countries started developing privacy coin concerns right around the time when the testnet came live, which slowed things down even further. At that point, privacy coins were frowned upon in most parts of the world, due to their ability to provide anonymity and obfuscate digital ledger transactions.
Multiple exchanges around the world delisted the leading privacy coins, making it difficult for the community members to reach them. Meanwhile, Mimblewimble offered similar anonymity and privacy of transactions, but also a heavy emphasis on scalability and fungibility, which are the features that many leading blockchains were, and still are, lacking to this day.
Despite it bringing anonymity and privacy that are causing so much concern among the authorities, the Litecoin Foundation still believes that integrating Mimblewimble is the right move, as it would help Litecoin’s status as “sound money.” As such, it would be more resistant to issues like depreciation, or negative influence from monetary policy.
To learn more about this token visit our Investing in Litecoin guide.
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