January Progress:
The biggest news from January is that I’ve found a way to support non-interactive transactions in Mimblewimble! The biggest difficulty with using MW is the need for sender and receiver to communicate, which requires receiver to be online when sending. My proposal, along with an updated version of the write-up that will be released soon, eliminates that need. This removes a major UX hurdle, limits long-term maintenance requirements, and supports receiving via cold-storage, making hardware wallets easier to support.
On the development side, the build process has been determined for libmw, and local builds are working for libmw-ltc (checkout libmw-core and libmw-ltc to the same parent directory, and you should be able to build libmw-ltc). I’ll setup CI/CD in the next month or so, but the important part is multi-repo local builds are working.
I’ve also built out a robust Database framework with transactional capabilities to support atomic updates across multiple tables, and have implemented the block database querying and updates, which is coin-agnostic, and has been partially tested using LTC-specific header and block models.
The security audit results are back from Grin++, so I’ve applied all fixes to Grin++ and libmw, and will be awaiting final review from the auditors. The audit turned out to be a humbling lesson in just how complicated C++ really is. I’ve learned enormously as part of the process, and the Grin++ & libmw codebases are significantly better as a result. A huge thanks again to the contributors in the Grin, Beam, and LTC communities who made that audit possible.
On the Grin++ side, we’ve had a successful planned hardfork, our pre-hardfork syncing issues have been resolved, and Grin++ 0.7.5 is available now which has turned out to be the most stable release yet. For the first time since Grin++'s creation, the support channels are finally quiet, which means more time to focus on actual development. As long as things remain quiet, and I don’t have to focus on putting out fires, I expect an even faster development pace over the coming months.
The priority for February will be to implement the consensus rules for the LTC EB, including all validation and a full suite of tests. This is the most important part of the code, so it will be time consuming to make sure all of the details are correct, and the code has full test coverage. Once that’s complete, I will work on the API for the extension block, so we can start integrating libmw into the existing LTC codebase.
I will also focus on getting the new one-sided tx proposals thoroughly reviewed, and if no major security concerns are found, I will create an LIP for community feedback.