MimbleWimble will be completed on March 15

• Litecoin’s MimbleWimble-Extension Block proposal will be completed on March 15. 
• Users will be able to convert Bitcoin to Litecoin using atomic swaps to take advantage of MWEB’s privacy features.

As announce by the official Litecoin Twitter account, the code for the MimbleWimble via Block Extension (MWEB) will be completed within the next. After the upgrade was first proposed in 2019, MimbleWimble will grant more privacy and fungibility to the Litecoin blockchain – conceived from the combination of several technologies, such as “Confidential Transactions”, CoinJoin, among others.

✨In 1 week MWEB (MimbleWimble via Extension Blocks), will be code complete ✨

Don’t know what this means? Read up on the latest update to Litecoin on our blog: https://t.co/kG8PeQUNQU

— litecoin (@litecoin) March 9, 2021

The protocol’s lead developer, David Burkett, recently updated the community on the progress of MimbleWimble and on the wallet that will allow users to take advantage of the privacy features. In his latest report, Burkett ruled out the possibility of a delay in the delivery of the update and confirmed that the mainnet release is scheduled for sometime in 2021.

What will MimbleWimble change for Litecoin?

The Litecoin Foundation describes MimbleWimble via Blockchain Extension as follows:

(…) it will provide the benefit of hiding transaction amounts and improve scalability due to its ability to compact transactions. MWEB has the ability to scale better than Litecoin and Bitcoin while also having the side benefit of acting as a block size increase on the main chain without there actually being one. This helps increase Litecoin’s transaction throughput.

Litecoin developer Loshan elaborated on other benefits of MWEB yesterday. He believes Bitcoin users will benefit from the upgrade. When implemented, users will be able to move funds from Litecoin’s base layer to the second layer, the MimbleWimble chain. There, transactions will be completely private. Loshan claims that this will provide improved fungibility and financial privacy:

Unlike Bitcoin – where all addresses and amounts can be seen by anyone – MWEB + CoinJoin transactions are private.

Bitcoin holders can use this feature with the atomic swaps function to exchange BTC for LTC “in a decentralized and trustless manner”. Funds can go through MWEB and then be returned in BTC, but with transactions fully protected by the protocol. Loshan added:

This is one of the many ways Litecoin complements Bitcoin. Their technical similarity allows for interaction between the two chains, while some more experimental technologies can be tested on Litecoin.

Users and exchanges will also be able to opt-in to using MWEB as it is not mandatory. With this, the Litecoin community intends to increase privacy, while not hurting the relationship with crypto exchanges, as privacy coins have been targeted by governments and regulators in the past.