Te team behind the development of Litecoin, the first alternative cryptocurrency announced the latest roadmap concerning the improvement of the blockchain solution created by Charles Lee. Litecoin is well known for its similarity with Bitcoin.
Litecoin was first created in 2011, since then the market capitalization has grown –totalling more than $200 million–. Litecoin is a ‘fork’ of the Bitcoin original source code, however, the first alternative cryptocurrency adopted a few changes from its ancestor:
- The block time was reduced 2.5 minutes per block.
- The total amount of Litecoins in circulation will eventually reach 84 million (instead of the 21 million Bitcoins to ever exist).
- The Proof-of-Work algorithm, Scrypt, which is ‘memory intensive’ (it has some level of resistance against ASICs).
Litecoin is especially popular in China, where it’s seen as a Bitcoin-correlated asset.
Litecoin Roadmap
The Litecoin Association is a non-profit organization registered in the State of Texas, USA.
Organised by passionate volunteers the Litecoin Association brings together the expertise of technologists, activists, and business people and works to improve the Litecoin experience for entrepreneurs, investors, consumers and the general public alike.
The association has worked alongside the Litecoin core development team to bring a roadmap, the goal is to boost its adoption and to release new features. The document detailing the association’s new announcements can be found here. In short, the Litecoin Association has decided to bring a new member to its board of directors.
Franklyn Richards will be joining the association’s ranks. According to the roadmap document, Richards has been involved with Litecoin since 2013 managing the association’s youtube channel and social media. Additionally, Richards has directed projects including Litecoin.com and LoafWallet.
In the more technical side of things, Litecoin will see a new client release. This feature-rich update will bring several protocol upgrades, they are too many to enumerate, but the mosts important are Segregated Witness adoption, HD wallet, small optimizations in memory management, faster transaction validations, Tor protocol support, and much more.
Litecoin will also future-proof its implementation, the team will include upgrades that will enable Litecoin to support the Lightning Network, Compact Blocks, and a smart-contract solution.
Source: Litecoin Association
Image via Litecoin Branding Guide