Litecoin’s co-founder, Charlie Lee, explains the company’s hidden work on Litecoin core development and states that privacy feature “MimbleWimble” shall be ready within 2019. While Litecoin will soon have its privacy-feature, what should it learn from existing privacy-centric coins? Let’s dig deeper.
LTC to Hit Privacy Feature in 2019
Few argue that Litecoin’s eight years journey comes by copying the Bitcoin’s code, Charlie Lee went on to Twitter and explains how and what development aspects the project is focusing on.
It comes in the wake of firing criticism on Lee’s action of cashing out his LTC stash and community’s talk of no code commits appear in 2019. On August 10, 2019, Lee released a series of tweets, explaining that a handful of core developers are working on the Litecoin Core. Lee says that;
It’s no secret that we have purposefully kept Litecoin’s code very close to Bitcoin’s code. Since we are mostly just merging in Bitcoin changes, we only need a lead Litecoin Core developer doing the merges and the rest of us help with code reviews, testing, and gitian builds.
Lee defends Litecoin development FUD, stating that the similar arguments occurred in 2018 and bets that people might have a similar thought in 2020 also. While addressing the concern of the community, urging privacy-enabling protocols in Litecoin, Lee hints MimbleWimble and Confidential Transactions feature.
He quickly marks that MimbleWimble will be live sometime in 2019. While this was announced earlier in Feb, there were no further updates occurred, neither from founder nor from the company. For which, he says that “he dropped the ball” and shifted focus on adoption. However, he later requested an apology for lack of communication. Moreover, he claims that “fungibility is extremely important and says he will get the ball rolling on MW/CT again.”
That said, I believe it’s time now for me to shift focus from adoption back to development. I still think fungibility is extremely important and I will get the ball rolling on MW/CT again. This time, I won’t make any promises on dates.
While he denies declaring any date for the development of MW, users can expect sometime this year.
The Lesson for Litecoin from Existing Privacy-Centric Coins
Litecoin by having Mimblewimble will debut privacy feature just like other privacy-centric coins such as Zcash, Monero, Dash, and many others.
Monero is by far known for its privacy-centric feature but doesn’t bother working within the regulatory regime. Since its launch in 2014, Monero has now hit the market cap of 1.3 billion. It says that crypto exchanges will shift in crypto-friendly countries and Monero remains available for trading across a handful of crypto exchanges in these countries.
ZCash – similar to Monero, ZCash is a cryptocurrency mostly comes in the picture for its cutting-edge privacy feature. It claims that most regulators, including the UK, US, and Singapore, welcome ZCash and eventually its trading are also available across top exchanges such as Coinbase and Gemini. While ZCash works similar to Cash, it claims that existing AML and terrorist financing rules can be applied to it.
Dash – This cryptocurrency perhaps is one of the leading assets in terms of adoption. It was created as a fork of Litecoin in 2014, and just like Litecoin (LTC), the transactions and addresses of Dash are also transparent. The project built DarkSend on top of Dash’s architecture as a privacy feature.
Besides, it has recently signed a partnership deal with BlockchainIntel with a mission to develop a tool that analysis crypto transactions and addresses. This tool will eventually help exchanges (that list Dash) to detect high-risk transactions and address.
Research believes that the soon after collaboration announcement, Coinbase exchange announced its decision to explore Dash cryptocurrency.
Sources:
Editor’s note: The article was updated on August 22, 2019, to mention Coinut being used as a primary source while writing it.
Disclaimer: The presented information is subjected to market condition and may include the very own opinion of the author. Please do your ‘very own’ market research before making any investment in cryptocurrencies. Neither the writer nor the publication (TronWeekly.com) holds any responsibility for your financial loss.
Never miss our daily cryptocurrency news, price analysis, tips, and stories. Join us on Telegram | Twitter or subscribe to our weekly Newsletter.