September 2022 Progress:
Light Clients
The code for supporting retrieval of MWEB UTXOs (unspent coins) for use by MWEB light clients is out for review It was designed so that light clients can request UTXOs in batches, and verify that each batch is committed to by a recent block. This is similar to how they can currently retrieve regular LTC transactions and verify that the transactions are committed to in a block’s merkle root. In order to do this, each batch of UTXOs has to come with enough hashes to verify the outputs belong to the Merkle Mountain Range (MMR) that commits to the MWEB UTXO set.
This was more difficult to implement than I had hoped. Since MMRs are reasonably more complex than the simpler merkle roots that regular LTC blocks use, it turned out to be quite a challenge designing the algorithm that determines the minimum set of hashes necessary to verify the UTXOs. Because of the complexity of this algorithm, I’m going to hold off on creating the new release until some of the light client dev teams have had time to understand how the new code works. Instead, I’ll host a node with the latest code that wallet developers can develop and test against, and if we need to tweak it to make it a little simpler (at a slight efficiency cost), we can do that much easier than if the code was already released.
Aside from working with wallet developers and improving documentation to assist with their development, I’ll also be backfilling some functional tests and fixing a few latent wallet display bugs this month in preparation for when we decide to go forward with the v0.21.3 release.