July Progress:
Coding
I’ve shifted away from writing new code so the MWEB codebase can remain stable while the auditors perform their review. I’ve been focusing instead on rebasing our changes from the LTC 0.18 branch to the LTC 0.21 branch.
For those unfamiliar with git terminology, what this means is we started with the code from the LTC 0.18 release (the latest at the time), and have been coding MWEB on top of that. However, LTC 0.18 is no longer the most recent code, since the release for LTC 0.21 is nearly ready. So I’m merging the MWEB code we wrote onto the LTC 0.21 codebase so that we still have all of the latest features (like taproot) in our MWEB release. This is a manual process that can be very tedious and time consuming, since code changes that were made in LTC 0.21 could interfere with the changes we made to support MWEB. These conflicts must be carefully addressed individually, which has been taking up much of my time.
Fortunately, I’ve finally got all of the node changes merged and building successfully. I’m working on fixing some failing tests, and then I will start doing the same thing with the wallet code. Once that is all finished and reviewed, we should be able to make a pre-release to start testing how the code works on mainnet. In particular, we’ll focus on making sure it communicates fine with older nodes, validates and propagates transactions & blocks, does not prematurely enforce MWEB rules before activation, and is able to successfully mine valid blocks.
Reviews & Audits
Members of the team developing Tari were kind enough to spend some time to give a high-level review of the design & code. They provided us with their findings here and here. In addition to finding a few potential issues, they’ve also thoroughly documented their understanding of the changes, which can serve as a useful resource for others trying to learn about MWEB.
Also, we received the official audit proposal from Quarkslab, which we’ve accepted[*], so they will be officially starting their audit in just a few days. This is expected to wrap up by mid-October, when we will be provided a report of all findings. Once we address the issues found, we’ll be able to create an official release (release number TBD).
[*] Thorough auditors like Quarkslab can make all the difference in the success of a project. Unsurprisingly, this means they can be quite pricey. By “we’ve accepted”, what I really mean is Charlie has, since he generously chose to pay for this audit. We are very fortunate to have him around 
I had to take some time off this month for personal reasons, so my update was a little lighter than we’ve been used to. Things will be back to normal next month. Thanks for your understanding.