The launch of MWEB (MimbleWimble Extension Blocks) in May 2022, the number of coins held within MWEB has grown from 0 to as much as 8,000. Though the benefit of using MWEB has been discussed in other articles, let's review three reasons more people will hold their Litecoin within MWEB both short and long term.
Privacy
The only way to benefit from the privacy provided by MWEB is if you hold your Litecoin within MWEB. As stated by David Burkett, there is minimal benefit to pegging coins in and out of MWEB often.
First, holding your Litecoin in a typical LTC address exposes your net worth each time you transact. This includes transactions to peg into MWEB. Also, the strongest part of MWEB's privacy is provided by never revealing any information about the amounts being transacted as long as the transaction stays within MWEB (MWEB wallet to MWEB wallet). The longer you hold your Litecoin within an MWEB wallet and transact within MWEB, the more your net worth becomes obfuscated and less traceable by outside viewers. The incentive for any long term Litecoiner is to transition coins into MWEB wallets as they become more widely available.
Scalability
Although the size and scale of the core Litecoin chain is unchanged, the addition of MWEB did provide effective block size and throughput increases. Although the exact maximum throughput of MWEB isn't known, it has been estimated to be as high as 10x that of the core Litecoin chain. If crypto becomes commonly used by 8 billion people in the world, and you believe that everyone should have the right to interact with the base layer, it will become necessary to scale beyond not only Bitcoin's 7 transactions per second (TPS), but also Litecoin's previous max of 56 TPS.
Even if Litecoiners prefer to hold on the transparent part of the blockchain, after that maximum is met, the easiest way to hold your own keys and transact on the base layer will be through MWEB. Part of what sets MWEB (and MimbleWimble more generally) apart from other coins' privacy implementations is its ability to effectively minimize and prune transaction data both to preserve privacy while also reducing blockchain bloat. If MWEB does 10x Litecoin's TPS, it provides a heavy incentive not only to move coins into MWEB, but to keep them there for speedy and reliable transactions.
Accessibility
As of now, the only way to open an MWEB wallet is through Litecoin Core. Though this is a great incentive to increase the node count for Litecoin, it won't last forever. Already, Cake Wallet has stated they are working to add support for MWEB on their mobile wallet. As user demand increases and developers have time to learn and trust the tech behind MWEB, other wallets should follow suit. Many of us don't want to sacrifice the security of a hardware wallet for example, and we likely won't have to long term. As software and hardware ecosystems are often sticky (Ledger users unlikely to switch to Trezor or vice-versa without a major reason), MWEB support could become the major reason for users to switch, sparking a competition to implement MWEB support for solid business reasons.
As the options become more numerous, more Litecoiners will be able to hold their coins within MWEB without having to migrate out of their favorite ecosystem.
The future is bright and development is ongoing for Litecoin! Follow along and keep an eye out for your opportunity to move Litecoin into its MWEB future.
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