Litecoin-Funded Grin Developer Challenges Mimblewimble's Privacy Issue

A 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's privacy-centric coin Grin, started a thread on monthly updates detailing progress on both Grin's development and the integration of MW's privacy-focused technology into Litecoin.

Burkett challenges the "Achilles heel of Mimblewimble privacy".

In terms of Grin's progress, the developer 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 block.

"The Achilles heel of mimblewimble privacy though, has always been that transactions are broadcast before they've had a chance to be 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 before broadcasting is one of many different techniques we can use to combat that."

The implementation follows a recent report claiming that MW's privacy is "Fundamentally flawed" as a developer managed to track 96% of Grin transactions before they came to CoinJoin, a block that collects all MW's transactions to ensure their anonymity.

Litecoin Foundation is funding Burkett's efforts to integrate Grin's privacy.

Alongside Grin's developments, the developer confirmed that the Litecoin Foundation will be funding his efforts to implement the MW extension block as well as to continue his work on Grin.

Burkett also noted that he has been working with Lee and Bitcoin researcher Andrew Yang for several months to design a Mimblewimble extension block to enable confidential transactions on Litecoin.

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