Litecoin MimbleWimble Update

Litecoin for some time has been creating noise about assuaging the risks associated with the transparent ledger system in Blockchain technology. With the upkeep of a transparent ledger, Blockchain provides a medium through which all the transactions can be viewed because the mechanism supports it. Keeping that in mind Litecoin has promulgated two new draft Litecoin improvement Proposals that are designed and furnished with details that would improve the privacy features of the noted network. 

The authors of the proposal Andrew Yang, David Burkett and Charlie Lee are of the opinion that the transparency has had a drastic impact on the firm’s functional fungibility. In simple words Fungibility is the innate quality of a good or an asset that makes it interchangeable with another good or asset of the same quality. 

Charlie Lee, founder of Litecoin had earlier pronounced plans to discover privacy technologies because the scaling issue is behind them. Now a more pressing issue is fungibility and Privacy.

Why should you know this?

Because this is the dilemma that most coins like Litecoin and Bitcoin are facing currently. It is not private because one can see who held what coin in which address in the past. And competition knows this! That said, fungibility faces risk in the long-term. The Litecoin foundation has outlined the proposal from the observation it has made. It had strong reasons to outline the drafts. 

It is a possibility that personal information is collected from the respective IP address or exchanges which can be leaked and tied to the addresses which is risky. It has been observed that as and when entities link addresses to distasteful activities the taint metric can be applied. Important organizations including governments have already started blacklisting addresses. 

Privacy seems to be one of the biggest priorities when it comes to improving protocol because with greater privacy comes greater functional fungibility. The Litecoin foundation has started working on integrating scalability and privacy-focussed protocol called Mimblewimble which was a tongue-tying curse from the Harry Potter series.

About MimbleWimble

MimbleWimble is a protocol that came into being when an anonymous user in Bitcoin developers chatroom. MimbleWimble transactions are derived from another transaction type called confidential transactions. The confidential transactions lets the senders to encrypt the amount of coins which are to be sent using blinding factors. Blinding factors is nothing but a random value which is used to encrypt the coin amount in the transaction. The user selects the blinding factor which encrypts the amount that is being transacted, so the transactions are clouded but are verifiable therefore substantially increasing privacy.

How will MibleWimble work?

Coming back to the proposals, the authors are looking at implementing Mimblewimble protocol as the opt-in new transaction format through extension blocks’. Extension blocks are soft forks lookalikes but are much more advanced. It appears like a regular base block but there is a major difference. While a base block is cryptographically interlooped with the previous and the next base block chaining these blocks in a chronological manner; each canonical block links to the corresponding extensions block.

These extension blocks function concurrently with the main chain canonical blocks at an average interval of 2.5 minutes. The actual functionality will be to ensure that private transactions occur inside the EB. Users can then use Mimblewimble to move their coins to and from the Extension block through an integrating transaction. 

The proposal has without any obfuscation stated the opt-in integration and how it will impact privacy and scalability. The proposal also handles the fusion between Extension blocks, canonical blocks and the coins. 

Litecoin MimbleWimble & Extension Blocks are truly Novel

Although the move hints at averting risks, the challenge is unqiue because Extension blocks have never been implemented on a live Blockchain before. It will obviously require time, analysis and audits to ensure there are no issues or bugs. It’s best not to rush such a robust and complictaed overhaul, as there is potential danger to lose coins or inflate the supply.

The Latest Litecoin MimbleWimble Update as of 7/4/20:

Even though this daunting task has proved incredibly complex, the wait will be totally worth it. And good news! In terms of the roadmap, July 2020 is still slated for the initial block download. August is set for chain reorganization logic, and the Activation logic and the launch of the test-net is set for September 2020! This is very exciting news for all Litecoin holders.

The Future of Litecoin

Litecoin has always been a very important cryptocurrency to the space, and as we move into the future, we imagine Litecoin has the potential to be one of the most widely adopted and used cryptocurrencies in terms of mass transactions on a daily basis.

We envision Litecoin having real potential in mastering micropayments in the future of eCommerce. As most individuals choose rather to store and save bitcoin much like a commodity like gold, Litecoin has a real chance of being a cryptocurrency that is actually used as a currency, not a hybridized currency / commodity like bitcoin has become.

Litecoin is the perfect user friendly and corporate friendly cryptocurrency and is incredibly fast and secure. It has our vote!

—The DeFiRev Team

DeFiRev.com is #1 in DeFi News. Check back in soon to find out the latest Litecoin MimbleWimble updates & the latest DeFi News.

How Solana has solved scalability issues of Blockchain

Decentralized applications need the global exposure it rightly deserves. The current trends show how successful decentralized token platforms have been and Solana is a high-speed single layer blockchain that has been designed to create solutions that will allow decentralized blockchains to become a globalized data system.

Scalability is one of the biggest challenges that Blockchain faces. Solana has solutions for the common problems of blockchain that currently supports a peak capacity of 65k transactions per second and 400ms block times with the help of a timestamp system called Proof-of-History (PoH).

What is Solana?

Solana was founded in 2017 by Antony Yakavenko who was an executive at Qualcomm. He has had a plethora of experience working with different decentralized systems with compression algorithms for DropBox. He then joined hands with Greg Fitzgerald the CTO and Eric Willians to create a trustless protocol that converts into a code the time passage within the data structure allowing for superior scalability.

Solana is a delegated Proof-of-Stake protocol that focuses on providing scalability without giving up on security and decentralization attributes.

SOL Token

Solana has a token called SOL passable to the nodes on the Solana Blockchain to validate its output on an on-chain program.

Circulating Supply16,350,633 SOL (3.35%)

Current Total Supply*488,634,933 SOL

Initial Total Supply500,000,000 SOL

Key features

Proof of History

The biggest challenge that distributed networks face is to find a common ground on time and sequence in which events occur. As a part of the system, all validators are required to solve SHA256-based Verifiable Delay functions (VDF). By default, VDF requires a fixed number of steps to analyze but produces an output that can be publicly verified.

Its unique Decentralized timeline system called Proof of History or PoH is built in order to solve the issue of time in distributed networks that does not have a single source of time. PoH uses Verifiable Delay functions that allow every single node to generate timestamps with SHA256 computations. The mechanisms call for holistic growth and high-frequency blockchain applications in order to free the global financial system.

TowerBFT integration

PoH allows the user to compute the node scenarios with only a fraction of the messaging overhead of a majority of the PoS systems. They work with Solana’s version of PBFT or Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance as the network’s time-keeper letting the protocol encode vote lockouts in the ledger if any so that validators do not vote on two different forks at the same time. If any such thing is detected the validator will be penalized by the slashing of his stakes.

Turbine

The time required to promote all blockchain data to all the nodes can be the biggest roadblock to achieve scalability. The lack of bandwidth could be the reason behind this. Solana proposes that a solution to this would be disintegration of data into packets with smaller amounts of bandwidth. Turbines are that feature that leverages the network to transport data in bits for more impact.

Gulfstream

For every single block production process, the network leaders will also be decided based on their individual stakes. The validators as well as the clients can forward transactions to the leader much ahead of time allowing validators to execute the transactions ahead of time, rapidly switch leaders, and also reduce confirmation times.

Cloud break

Poor memory size in a distributed system works as the biggest roadblock to a good performance. Cloudbreak as a feature was designed to optimize the ongoing reads and writes across RAID 0 configuration of SSDs.Additional disks add to the storage capacity of on-chain programs with the increase in concurrent reads and programs written when execution takes place.

Conclusion

Solana is the future because its solutions target scalability for blockchain systems. It has also addressed some of the biggest issues that decentralized platforms face. It has removed sharding from its infrastructure which has contributed towards faster validation and more security also.

Currently, Solano operates on a non-linear architecture which undoubtedly is better than linear blockchains and could command the future. Proof of History is surely an interesting way to remove the time-issue from the blockchain. Solana’s solutions may be destined for a global time standard for blockchain operations.