October 2022 Progress:
Light Clients
I had a chance to talk to some wallet developers at the LTC Summit, which I used to better understand what each needs in order to support MWEB. From these discussions, it appears there will be a few different approaches taken for syncing and identifying MWEB wallet transactions, each with different performance, security, and privacy tradeoffs. My goal is to make sure we provide all of the APIs, p2p messages, and libraries necessary to give each wallet developer the tools they need to go their own way.
I wrote up a quick document briefly describing the two high-level approaches (client-side and server-side filtering) that wallet devs can take to support MWEB, and the pros and cons of each: MWEB Light Clients. I’ve been focusing strictly on client-side filtering these past few months, since that offers the strongest privacy and security guarantees, and while most wallet developers were on board with the idea, one showed more interest in server-side filtering for performance reasons.
View Keys
Server-side filtering of txs & outputs is done using “view keys,” which can be shared with a server so that they can identify transactions belonging to your wallet. Right now, that also means the server would learn the amounts of your transactions, unfortunately. There is a way this can be done without revealing the amounts by adding a new output format version, so this may be worth looking into in the future sometime. In the meantime, I’ve decided to work on adding full view key support to LTC Core that can serve as an example for other wallets.
This month, I plan to finish adding in view keys and get that out for review, so I can start working on MWEB support in our raw transactions APIs. These are the APIs that some third-party wallets, in particular hardware wallets, use to build transactions. We’ve already had a few 3rd party devs request MWEB functionality for these APIs, so it would be great to be able to include that in our next release.