Although most people will look at the current Litecoin price action as a pump-and-dump, there are some genuine reasons to get excited about this currency moving forward. Similar to any other altcoin, there are some interesting developments underway as we speak. A recent Medium post highlighted some of the upcoming changes, and we have listed a few of the points below.
3. More Atomic Swaps
It is evident Litecoin has successfully set the tone when it comes to cross-chain atomic swaps. The developers successfully completed such a swap with Decred not too long ago, which is considered to have been the first of many in this regard. Being able to trade currencies across blockchains in real time – or something close to it – is a major development that could make centralized exchanges obsolete. If these developments ever come to full fruition, the cryptocurrency world will look very different.
Moreover, it appears there are some other developments in the world of Litecoin-enabled atomic swaps. Successful tests with Vertcoin and even Bitcoin show there is a very bright future ahead for this technology. Surprisingly enough, these transactions were completed in an on-chain fashion, rather than by settling things off-chain. There is still plenty of work to do in this regard, but there’s good reason to be excited about atomic swaps right now.
2. MAST
Bringing privacy to established cryptocurrencies which never focused on it before has proven rather difficult. After all, Bitcoin and Ethereum don’t have any privacy-oriented functionality right now, nor does Litecoin. That situation may come to change sooner than people would expect, though, as MAST technology is currently being developed behind the scenes. This feature introduces additional privacy by hiding “lumped” transfers through a Merkle root.
There are other benefits to MAST, as it will eventually introduce smart contracts to Litecoin. Although this technology is already available to Bitcoin developers and users, there is no “convenient” implementation of the technology just yet. If all goes according to plan, MAST should be introduced after the SegWit2x Bitcoin hard fork. There is no official fixed date for this implementation, though, and the date may be pushed back in the end.
1. Covenants
Although this feature has not been talked about that much, Litecoin’s covenants will play a big role in the ecosystem moving forward. Being able to select LTC coins to be lumped together and stay together is an intriguing approach. This would allow users to keep their coins bound together without getting them mixed up with other network transactions. It is a bit of a complicated solution, which may explain why it is not something the developers are rushing to release either.
The reason why covenants matter so much is because they pave the way for colored coins on top of Litecoin. Additionally, there will be a way to introduce “vaults” in order to lock up LTC balances in case someone successfully stole currency. From a security point of view, this makes a lot of sense, although there may not be an initial demand for this feature right away. According to our information, covenants will allow users to build in delays for transactions potentially created by an assailant and create a “master key” enabling users to spend funds faster than the assailant would ever be able to.
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