MimbleWimble is just a technology; the blockchain which is supporting its own currency is called "grin" (similar to CryptoNote vs Bytecoin except without the scam surrounding it). I really wish these wouldn't be conflated in the public eye, but the reporting seems to do it quite a bit.

Regarding moving away from Bitcoin, I proposed a scheme to the grin developers by which they can softfork in a Bitcoin peg onto their chain (using Confidential Assets it can cheerfully support its own currency alongside pegged bitcoins alongside whatever, they don't affect each others' security but they do share a privacy set) which they seemed quite enthusiastic about.


There has been a lot of research and development happening in the Mimblewimble space lately, but it's extremely fast moving and there hasn't been a lot of writing about it. You can follow the mimblewimble-dev mailing list for some of it, but unfortunately the non-boring stuff been largely happening in meatspace. A short list of developments since this thread was started

• ability to support multiple asset types
• my proposal to have a testcoin alongside the native currency and to support softforking in a bitcoin peg once the bitcoin side is figured out, as well as pegs from other currencies (including blinded-amount pegs from CA-supporting chains)
• the realization that amiller's idea for blinded exponents could be used to efficiently add many "denominations" to each asset, allowing shrinking their rangeproofs with much less of a privacy hit than we'd originally expected
• the realization that we could attach some forms of scripting to mimblewimble after all
• the realization that for many things we could get script functionality with much better privacy and without any changes to the Voldemort design at all and this would be uncensorable because it would result in normal looking transactions
• oh, and we can Lightning this way
• oh, and this doesn't have much to do with MW at all, any blockchain that supports schnorr signatures will allow these uncensorable efficiently verifiable hyper-private contracts which include atomic swaps between the chains
• more to come on this front, still iterating and working out details...
• realization that Ruffing and Moreno-Sanchez's ValueShuffle is compatible with Mimblewimble+Confidential Assets allowing coinjoin where the original transactions never hit the network so nobody can record them and PS it compresses Mimblewimble's already-cool "one signature per transaction" to "one signature per aggregate transaction" which is way better and will incentivize people to use the tech, improving their privacy

and I'm sure there's other stuff I'm forgetting.