New Developments Raise Confidence In Litecoin
Litecoin was initially conceived in 2011 as an alternative to Bitcoin, with hopes to act as the silver to Bitcoin’s gold. With a faster mining time of 2.5 minutes and higher limit, Litecoin was supposed to operate as an alternative that did not have any of the perceived shortcomings of Bitcoin. It managed to find some initial success on the basis of this platform.
In recent times, though, Litecoin has managed to fall to the wayside. This is because of the rise of more alternatives, namely Ethereum. Nowadays, Litecoin prices are in the four to five-dollar range. This is a far cry from when it managed to reach $40 in its heyday.
It has been a rough time for Litecoin; however, the team behind it has conceived a plan to bring it back into prominence. The Litecoin Association has recently posted a new development roadmap that is hoped to attract more people to the altcoin and revitalize it for the current market.
More online services
One of the primary focuses of the roadmap is the development of online services. The main reason for Bitcoin’s growth is that the infrastructure that supported it also managed to grow with it. Litecoin is currently popular in China and has seen quite a lot of trading in the region, but it has not seen corresponding growth outside of it.
The development roadmap tries to solve this problem by developing additional online services. One of these is the establishment of more wallets. This can be seen in the addition of new versions of Electrum-LTC and an iOS LoafWallet.
LoafWallet was developed by the same team as Bitcoin’s BreadWallet and boasts security features like AES hardware encryption and app sandboxing. It also has a simple user interface, Apple Watch and Siri integration, and it allows users to directly buy Litecoins through the app.
The Android-compatible version of Electrum-LTC will be released this month with quite a few upgrades. Litecoin Nodes, LiteTips, and LiteVault are all very useful online apps that have fallen dormant will also see reactivation as Litecoin seeks to become more relevant.
Interesting changes
The most important changes, though, are the ones to Litecoin itself. The roadmap projects several changes to the altcoin so as to make it more competitive in today’s market. This includes faster signature validation, wallet pruning, memory usage improvements, an inbuilt Tor control sockets, ways to reduce upload traffic, and segregated witness functionality to allow for better transactions.
Overall, these changes make the Litecoin experience better for those who want to start investing and using it. All of these changes will be implemented slowly so as to ensure that they fit with the current Litecoin protocol and do not cause problems for the current users.
Hopefully, with all of these structural changes in place, Litecoin will be able to shine in the marketplace once again.
