Grin Developer Suggests A Solution For MimbleWimble Privacy Issue

A Grin developer funded by the Litecoin Foundation recently suggested a solution to fixing the common “Achilles heel of Mimblewimble privacy.” Named David Burkett, the developer at MimbleWimble (MW) privacy coin center Grin, started a thread on the monthly updates and detailed the progress on both Grin’s development and the integration of MW’s privacy focused technology into Litcoin (LTC).

The Grin developer suggests a new solution and announced the news officially on Twitter, where he said:

“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 as well.”

In regards to Grin’s progress, the Grin developer performed the first ever pre-broadcast MW Coinjoin which would allegedly make transactions more private by disabling the broadcasting before transactions joined others in the Coinjoin block. The Grin developer suggests that this issue is one of the most critical problems linked to the privacy of the protocol.

“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,” Burkett added and was featured in the latest crypto news.

This implementation also follows a recent report which claimed that MW’s privacy is “fundamentally flawed” mostly because one developer managed to track 96% of Grin transactions before they came to Coinjoin – the block collecting all the MW transactions to ensure their anonymity.

Published by Ivan Bogatyy at the blockchain research firm Dragonfly Research, that report shows that there is no way to fix that issue for MW and that the protocol should no longer be seen as a “viable alternative to Zcash or Monero when it comes to privacy.”

Aside from Grin’s developments, the Grin developer also confirmed that the Litecoin Foundation will be funding his efforts to implement the MW extension block and continue his work on Grin. The update went viral in the Litecoin news.