The founder of Litecoin, Charlie Lee, recently announced that he is working to add privacy and fungibility features to the digital coin. The potential confidential nature of Litecoin sparked serious media attention.
Lee has not put a specific time frame as to when the new privacy and fungibility solutions will be added to the coin, but the release is expected to be completed with the release of the next nod and by the end of 2019.
The decision is not firm, yet, according to press. However, Lee took to his Twitter account to announce the following:
Litecoin dev team spent hours discussing how to add Confidential Transactions. The way to do a soft fork CT is very similar to doing extension blocks and extension blk can be simpler and can do a lot more. We are now also exploring doing bulletproof MimbleWimble w/ extension blks.
The idea of MimbleWimble is actually inspired by Harry Potter. The founder added a picture of Platform 9 3/4 to complement his Litecoin plans.
The protocol itself is a privacy protocol created by Tom Elvis Jedusor. Many privacy coins, such as Beam and Grin, were built on the MimbleWimble protocol. What it does is add an extra layer of security by including certain blinding features when a transactions is made.
MimleWimble is sometimes referred to as: “Mimblewimble, which prevents your opponent from accurately casting their next spell”.
MimbleWimble can also help Litecoin with scalability and fungibility features.