A Grin (GRIN) developer funded by the Litecoin Foundation has suggested a solution for fixing the "Achilles heel of Mimblewimble privacy."

David Burkett, a developer at Mimblewimble'due south (MW) privacy-centric coin Grin, started a thread on monthly updates detailing progress on both Grin'southward development and the integration of MW's privacy-focused applied science into Litecoin (LTC). The developer announced the news on Twitter on Dec. 1:

"I'll be posting monthly status updates detailing progress on the LTC MW EB (YAY acronyms). This is geared toward those interested in LTC development, but will also talk a lot about Grin++ changes, so it may be interesting to Grinners too."

Burkett challenges the "Achilles heel of Mimblewimble privacy"

In terms of Grin's progress, the programmer has purportedly performed the first-ever pre-broadcast MW CoinJoin that would allegedly make transactions more private by disabling broadcasting before transactions joined others in the CoinJoin cake. Burkett noted that this event is 1 of the most critical problems associated with MW'southward privacy. He wrote:

"The Achilles heel of mimblewimble privacy though, has ever been that transactions are broadcast before they've had a chance to exist joined with other transactions. That means nodes monitoring the network can see the original input-to-output links of most transactions. Sending a transaction directly to a CoinJoin server earlier broadcasting is ane of many dissimilar techniques nosotros tin use to combat that."

Some researchers claim that there is no way to fix Mimblewimble'due south privacy

The implementation follows a recent report challenge that MW'south privacy is "fundamentally flawed" equally a developer managed to runway 96% of Grin transactions before they came to CoinJoin, a block that collects all MW's transactions to ensure their anonymity.

Published past Ivan Bogatyy at blockchain research firm Dragonfly Research, the report claims that in that location is no manner to fix that consequence for MW, and the protocol should no longer be considered as a "feasible alternative to Zcash or Monero when it comes to privacy."

Litecoin Foundation is funding Burkett'due south efforts to integrate Grinning'south privacy

Alongside Grinning's developments, the developer confirmed that the Litecoin Foundation will exist funding his efforts to implement the MW extension block likewise as to continue his piece of work on Grin. Litecoin creator Charlie Lee appear the initiative on October. 30.

Burkett as well noted that he has been working with Lee and Bitcoin researcher Andrew Yang (not the presidential candidate) for several months to design a Mimblewimble extension block to enable confidential transactions on Litecoin. Every bit such, the authors published two draft Litecoin Improvement Proposals using the MW protocol on October. 22.

In mid-November, Grin received an anonymous 50 Bitcoin (BTC) donation to its General Fund, sparking a rumor that the donation was related to Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto.