Litecoin has kept a low profile this season despite the broader cryptocurrency market. Once a top 10 player, LTC slid to the 16th position on the leaderboard after a volatile year.
The network’s MimbleWimble Extension Blocks [MWEB] upgrade has been under development for almost two years and reports about a major code change were reported a month ago. Since then, the Litecoin ecosystem has stayed relatively quiet. But MW developer David Burkett today admitted the delays and blamed himself for it. His tweet regarding the same read,
“A lot of people are frustrated with how long MWEB has taken. I alone am responsible for delays, yet it’s been just as frustrating for me. Perfection takes time. LTC has had 100% uptime since launch, and despite MWEB’s complexity, that streak will continue with its release.”
He also went on to confirm that,
“Currently working with auditors to make sure it’s safe before releasing. If anyone has doubts about the readiness of the code, they’re free to build it locally and try it out. Use branch 0.21.”
Burkett had previously revealed that the activation of the highly anticipated protocol is on track for an end-of-year launch on the LTC mainnet. Since its first publication on Github, Litecoin’s MW code has gone through numerous changes despite the project struggling to get sufficient developers to review it.
Litecoin’s MWEB Advantage
The MimbleWimble Extension Block upgrade aims to bring in fungibility and privacy in the Litecoin network. The testnet was rolled out in October 2020 and the code.
The protocol enables senders to encrypt the number of tokens to be sent with the help of “blinding factors” while obfuscating the addresses and thereby, ramping up the privacy of the blockchain while simultaneously increasing its scalability.
Besides, Litecoin uses the hashing algorithm called SHA2-526. However, the network is now slowly transitioning to the “much-faster” Blake 3 for all MWEB hashes. Blake 3 is essentially a comparatively newer crypto hash function and 10x faster than SHA-2.