February & March 2023 Progress:
v0.21.2.2 Release
We released a new minor version of Litecoin Core (v0.21.2.2) in February which contained some important security fixes. If you haven’t upgraded yet, you can download it here.
v24 Release
I’ve started working on a new major release for Litecoin Core that will contain everything that I’ve been working on this past year:
- PSBTs - To encourage hardware support for MWEB
- P2P Support for Light Clients - To allow for mobile and other more user-friendly wallets
- View Keys - To support “watch-only” wallets that don’t require having access to private spend keys in order to identify transactions you’ve sent or received.
- Payment Proofs - For traditional litecoin transactions, where proving you sent coins to an address could be done by just signing a message with your private key, and pointing to the transaction on the blockchain which shows the source address (which you just proved to be the owner of), and the destination address and amount. With MWEB, addresses and amounts are all encrypted, so in the case that you need to prove to an arbiter that you made a payment, a more complex proof is needed. This proof is described here.
- Descriptor wallets - The wallet code, originally written by Satoshi, was very limited, and not designed to support the many script types and features that have since been developed (P2SH, Taproot, BIP32, and now MWEB). Developers have been forced to hack in new wallet features in a messy, unsustainable way. To deal with this, BTC developers introduced “descriptor wallets,” which provide a more extensible replacement for the existing wallet backend. You can read more about them here. With Litecoin Core v24, we’ll be enabling descriptor wallets, and extending them to handle MWEB addresses, which should help solve a number of limitations we had with our initial MWEB wallet design.
So far, I’ve added the classic (pre-MWEB) litecoin code changes to the v24 bitcoin code, and am working on fixing tests. I’ll then merge in the already-released MWEB code, followed by the new features listed above, submitting everything for code review after each step. This will be a lengthy process taking us well into the summer, but the end result should be a new release that’s up-to-date with bitcoin core, and will include all of the new MWEB features everyone has been waiting for.