Litecoin is one of the leading cryptocurrencies in the market. Its blockchain has been working consistently with 0-downtime since its inception back in 2011. In order to continue to grow Litecoin globally, we need to solve the very important issue of fungibility. At the moment, Litecoin transactions are made completely public. This means that that certain types of transactional information can be deducted from the Litecoin ledger to track a person’s purchases or wealth.
If Litecoin is going to be adopted by mainstream users and businesses, we need to provide financial privacy. For example, fungibility helps protect users from having their transactions or balances readily accessible on the blockchain for criminals to identify attractive targets.
Following the Litecoin Community Crowdfunding System, the Litecoin Foundation is setting up a dedicated development fund which will go towards sponsoring David Burkett, who is a developer for Grin++, to work on implementing the Extension Block and MimbleWimble code for Litecoin so that we address this issue of fungibility.
The plan is for David to work 30 hours a week. This will be split into 15 hours for Grin++ and 15 hours for MimbleWimble via Extension Blocks. We believe that this will be a mutually beneficial arrangement because Grin++ code will eventually be forked onto Litecoin’s Extension Block. Therefore any development in Grin++ will be immediately beneficial to Litecoin.
For more information on how opt-in privacy will be implemented onto Litecoin, here are the two Litecoin Improvement Proposals (LIPs):
Since the current Litecoin code is very similar to Bitcoin code, David Burkett will have a large task ahead of him. Historically, Litecoin Core regularly merges code upgrades from Bitcoin Core. So in order to make sure that this continues to happen even after the MimbleWimble code has been integrated, David will need further resources to make the necessary infrastructure changes so once MimbleWimble code is released on Litecoin, the Litecoin Core developers will still be able to merge changes from future Bitcoin core releases.
The goal of this proposal is to raise $6,000 per month for 12 months for David Burkett for a total of $72,000. The funds will be held in an escrow account held by the Litecoin Foundation and will be released evenly each month after David Burkett releases his progress update and code repositories. If the total goal is not raised within the first month, then the BTC/LTC amount needed to fund the remaining USD balance will be updated according to the asset prices of Bitcoin and Litecoin at that given time.
Goal: $72,000.
Community donated:
- LTC: 1217.48955838 Ł
- BTC: 0.17583382 ₿
Charlie matched:
- LTC: 1173.93503951 Ł
- BTC: 0.17583382 ₿
Total donated:
- LTC: 2391.42459789 Ł
- BTC: 0.35166764 ₿
Total paid out:
- Dec 2019 - 138.36074798 Ł
- Jan 2020 - 84.19788186 Ł
- Feb 2020 - 100.60024815 Ł
- Mar 2020 - 154.31106539 Ł
- Apr 2020 - 127.00805019 Ł
- May 2020 - 124.86992716 Ł
- Jun 2020 - 144.90968504 Ł
- Jul 2020 - 93.11651670 Ł
- Aug 2020 - 95.48240896 Ł
- Sep 2020 - 129.78360747 Ł
- Oct 2020 - 106.68297731 Ł
- Nov 2020 - 67.75917036 Ł
- Dec 2020 - 47.96266586 Ł
- Jan 2021 - 0.15810081 ₿
- Feb 2021 - 0.12238040 ₿
- Mar 2021 - 29.49140969 Ł
- Apr 2021 - 22.22222222 Ł
- May 2021 - 33.435 Ł
- June 2021 - 42.968 Ł
- July 2021 - 37.006 Ł + 0.01745010 ₿
- Aug 2021 - 34.493
- Sep 2021 - 39.628
- Oct 2021 - 31.773
- Nov 2021 - 28.115
- Dec 2021 - 39.362
- Jan 2022 - 59.748
- Feb 2022 - 57.949
= $162,000
Total left in fund:
- LTC: 278.42719158 Ł
- BTC: 0.04916578 ₿
- ≈ $38,000
Here is how you can donate: (Charlie Lee will match every LTC and BTC donated!)
- Litecoin address: MLos7u44mMq1ufgPJZTatEfPm3Kgxj5Nt9
- Bitcoin address: 3Bn4x7uceS76X56DX3cT3ecVphVdMAFi6Y
Progress Updates
- David Burkett will provide a monthly progress report on litecointalk.io. You can read his first one at MWEB Progress Update Thread. Latest updates are posted to this thread: MWEB Progress Update Thread 2