Honest question here as i do not know the details of the mweb lite library, but does Cake need to sync from the Litecoin genesis when enabling MWEB? Wouldn’t it speed up the initialization process if it started at the block MWEB was added to the protocol?
Again, i don’t know the devil’s details so please inform if this isn’t possible.
With mwebd you’re not actually just syncing mwebheaders, and the mweb utxo set (the actual data needed for mweb sync). You are also downloading actual block headers from a litecoin node (this is what starts at genesis).
Still, why do we download all block headers from genesis?
Syncing all block headers is crucial for security because MWEB is not a separate blockchain; it’s an extension that’s fundamentally anchored to the main Litecoin chain.
You can’t trust the MWEB part of a block without first proving that the main block itself is legitimate and part of the one true Litecoin history.