Crypto exchange Binance announced it is ending support for Litecoin (LTC) transactions sent through the latest MimbleWimble (MWEB) upgrade. Binance warned that any transaction sent through the MWEB function would be lost since the crypto exchange can’t verify the sender’s address. The crypto exchange didn’t respond to Cointelegraph’s request for comments at the time of publishing. The announcement comes just days after major South Korean crypto exchanges delisted LTC due to the latest upgrade, which makes transaction information confidential. The delisting came just weeks after five crypto exchanges issued warnings similar to Binance. However, the delisting didn’t come as a …

Major cryptocurrency exchanges in South Korea have delisted Litecoin (LTC) weeks after flagging its privacy-focused MimbleWimble (MWEB) upgrade. In a public announcement on Wednesday, Upbit cited the Act on the Reporting and Use of Specific Financial Transaction Information, which prohibits anonymous transactions as the key reason for ending support for LTC. The delisting comes in the light of the much-awaited MWEB upgrade that made LTC transactions private, hiding some of the key identifiers. The upgrade was released earlier this year, nearly two years after its first proposal. The crypto exchange reached out to the Litecoin Foundation to understand the privacy-focused …

After two years of development, Litecoin (LTC) has finally launched its highly anticipated Mimblewimble upgrade, opening the door to more privacy-oriented transactions on the network. Mimblewimble’s integration into Litecoin came by way of the Mimblewimble Extension Block, also known as MWEB, which allows the network’s users to opt-in to confidential transactions. MWEB lead developer David Burkett, who has been sponsored by the Litecoin Foundation, said the upgrade improves Litecoin’s viability as a fungible currency that can be used for everyday transactions, pay employee salaries and even purchase real estate. Mimblewimble is a privacy-focused decentralized protocol that derives its name from …

Grin (GRIN), a major privacy-focused cryptocurrency, is apparently no longer resistant to mining with Application-Specific Integrated Circuits — or ASICs — according to a former core developer. Gary Yu, a former core Grin developer, used a Grin ASIC mining device to test out the miner’s performance, according to an Aug. 10 post on Grin’s official forum. Yu purportedly managed to mine three blocks in less than 24 hours, with a block reward totaling at 180 GRIN, or $118 as of press time. ASIC-powered mining occurred at block heights 819660, 820461, and 820801, Yu added. In the post, the former core …

Major privacy-oriented cryptocurrency, Beam (BEAM), is making its first official move towards decentralized finance, or DeFi. In anticipation of Beam’s soon-to-come hard fork, the team behind the project updated a number of relevant specifications, paving the way to the so-called “Confidential Defi,” Beam announced to Cointelegraph on June 24. Confidential Assets are at the core of Beam’s future DeFi offering Scheduled for June 28, the hard fork will enable Confidential Assets, or Beam CA — independent tokens on the Beam network. Beam CA will be a key component in the future Beam’s DeFi offering, Beam advisor Guy Corem said. Beam …

The lead developer on the Litecoin Mimblewimble (MW) project, David Burkett, has now built a functional testing framework and started to integrate the development work done so far into the Litecoin codebase. According to a May 1 report on the Litecointalk forums, the project to implement the MW privacy enhancements into Litecoin has reached an important milestone with the build of a test-bed. Burkett claims that he has also run some end-to-end validation tests through the framework. “I’ve built out a functional testing framework that builds valid headers, blocks, and transactions. I’ve now got some (mostly) complete end-to-end block validation …

Privacy-focused altcoin, Beam (BEAM), will soon execute its second hard fork. This fork will upgrade its Proof-of-Work (PoW) algorithm and activate new network features. According to an April 22 blog post, Beam’s second fork will occur at block 777,777, shifting the network’s PoW algorithm from BeamHash II to BeamHash III. The new PoW algorithm is expected to be a major improvement to the Beam mining network, and will enable fuller GPU card capabilities. Additionally, the firm said that the hard fork is designed to unlock some new features like confidential assets, one-sided payments, and the support of privacy protocol, Lelantus …

On March 1, David Burkett, a developer working on cryptocurrencies Grin (GRIN) and Litecoin (LTC), estimated that privacy protocol Mimblewimble will see a Litecoin testnet release before the end of summer. In an update to the Mimblewimble (MW) progress thread on Litecointalk.io, Burkett hesitantly predicts that MW will be launched on testnet before September. “I’ve so far been very hesitant to give exact dates on when things should be finished, because writing blockchain software is difficult, time-consuming, and unpredictable at times. I didn’t want artificial deadlines to force us to rush through parts of the code and introduce defects or …

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’s (MW) 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 (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 …

Mimblewimble, a privacy-focused blockchain protocol, is allegedly not private at all. According to an expert at blockchain research firm Dragonfly Research, Mimblewimble's privacy is fundamentally flawed, which he reportedly proved by discovering the exact addresses of senders and recipients for 96% transactions of Mimblewimble’s privacy-centric coin Grin (GRIN). Ivan Bogatyy, a researcher at United States-based Dragonfly Capital Partners, published a Medium post on Nov. 18 in which he claimed that he was able to break Grin’s purported privacy while spending just $60 per week on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Mimblewimble should no longer be treated as an alternative to Zcash …

The Litecoin Foundation has published two new draft Litecoin Improvement Proposals that work toward establishing privacy features for the network. On Oct. 22, the Foundation shared links to details of the draft proposals on GitHub: LIP-0002 EB and LIP-0003 MW. Protecting Litecoin’s functional fungibility from government As the Foundation outlines, both proposals are targeted at mitigating the privacy risks associated with a transparent ledger, where transaction history can be publicly traced. The proposal’s authors — Andrew Yang, David Burkett and Charlie Lee — argue that this transparency hinders Litecoin’s “functional fungibility in a government-regulated merchant world,” observing that: “Personal identifiable …

The Litecoin (LTC) Foundation has partnered with software development firm Beam to explore the implementation of a new protocol that would improve privacy and scalability. The news was reported in a Beam Medium blog post Feb. 7. The new protocol, dubbed “Mimblewimble” — a fictional tongue-tying curse from the popular Harry Potter novels — is reportedly being tested for use in conjunction with the scalability solution “Extension Blocks.” The Beam blog post states: “We have started exploration towards adding privacy and fungibility to Litecoin by allowing on-chain conversion of regular LTC into a Mimblewimble variant of LTC and vice versa. …