A few weeks ago, we wrote about the potential for Chaumian mints to improve Lightning Network wallets. Particularly custodial wallets that make a big privacy tradeoff to provide ease of use. At the time, we were surfacing a blogpost that made the case that Bitcoin/LN have provided the opportunity to bring the idea of Chaumian Mints back to life because the distributed nature of the BTC/LN provides the opportunity to implement mints that are truly robust because they are not being built on centralized assets that can be easily controlled by governments and other third parties like the US Dollar and gold.

Well, fast forward to last Friday and the world became aware of the fact that Eric Sirion has been working on a Chaumian Mint implementation called MiniMint. It is a Rust implementation of a federated Chaumian mint on top of Bitcoin that is in the very early stages. At this point, it is nothing more of a rough prototype, but it seems to be very well thought out. If you're interested in watching a coding demo that shows how federations are set up, how bitcoin is deposited, and how mint tokens are distributed to and sent by users, peep this video. If you are a developer who is interested in contributing to a project like this, reach out to Eric and help build the potential future of custodial bitcoin wallets.

Slowly but surely, the market continues to find creative ways to bring better UX experiences and privacy to bitcoin users. Your Uncle Marty is very excited about the growing trend of Chaumian mints becoming more popular of an idea and even more excited that developers are beginning to write code that is turning potential into code. It is still the very early days of these types of federated mints, but I believe they will become more significant as time rolls on. Onward!

Final thought...

The humidity curls are pretty hot, not gonna lie.