The Litecoin Association, which advocates on behalf of Litecoin, the third largest cryptocurrency in market capitalization, has teamed with the Litecoin Core development team on a Road Map 2016 outlining its plans for the future. The team is committed to improving the Litecoin experience.

The roadmap includes organizational changes and several development enhancements to the cryptocurrency and its websites.

Board Of Director Changes

From an organizational standpoint, the association has named Franklyn Richards to its board of directors following the departure of Ryszard Mielcarek. Richards since 2013 has volunteered on behalf of the Litecoin ecosystem and has managed the LA YouTube channel and Twitter accounts.

Hailing from Nottingham, U.K., Richards directs, designs and oversees the creation of the association’s educational videos. He also oversees the LoafWallet and Litecoin.com projects. Richards can be reached at franklyn@litecoinassociation.org.

The board appointed Robert English (AKA Red and KSAREDFX) as systems administrator, a function that Mielcarek previously handled. English will manage www.litecointalks.org, www.litecoin.info, and other resources. He will assume the systems administrator role in the coming weeks. He hails from Ontario, Canada, and has been active with Litecoin when he mined transactions using his CPU. He can be contacted at www.RobertEnglish.net.

Bylaws Drafted

The association has drafted organization bylaws to give governance. The bylaws cover director and officer status and placement, voting, and other activities related to the association’s future. The association board of directors will enact the bylaws and release them to the public. Association attorney Rishi Nair of Nair Law LLC in Chicago assisted in drafting the bylaws.

LitecoinTalk.org Overhaul

The association has been working to replace LitecoinTalk.org since it was taken offline after being hacked in March. It has provided an archive at https://archive.litecointalk.org. The association has considered Discourse as a possible platform and welcomes suggestions via Reddit as well as info@litecoinassociatoin.org. The new systems administrator will work with the development team on deploying a new version of LitecoinTalk.org.

The association will reopen membership following the enactment of its bylaws and the deployment of a new LitecoinTalk community.

Trademark Dispute Continues

Patrick Kothbauer of the Swedish Chamber of Digital Currency Commerce (www.scdcc.se) submitted the association’s trademark response to the European Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (OHIM).

The association named Jan Bryme as its European Union representative regarding the Litecoin Trademark dispute.

The European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) has clarified that in principle, neither party has to be represented before the office, but both parties, with no establishment, seat or domicile in the EU, can deal with the office directly. A person qualified to serve as the representative before the office is required.

The association and the Swedish Chamber and Digital Currency Commerce (SCDCC) have opposed the trademark.

To facilitate the opposition to the trademark, the SCDCC ceded its own opposition and joined the association in opposing the trademark. Andrew Vegetabile represents the association.

The association has sought to produce its own trademark in the United States with Nair’s legal assistance. The association’s goal is to secure the trademark and release it publicly so no ill-intentioned individual will hold it.

New Website In Development

A new website under development will provide an easily managed, adaptable and flexible infrastructure. The association plans to make better use of the domain for official communication.

Also read: Litecoin overtakes bitcoin in trading volume

LinkedIn Group Forms

A LinkedIn group for the association has been established by David Sterry, a developer at the ReinProject, a decentralized, freelance bitcoin marketplace. The LinkedIn group currently has 164 members.

Sterry recently agreed to assign administrative privileges to the group. The association welcomes any members to join the LinkedIn group.

Association Seeks Donations

The association, a 501©(6) non-for-profit organization, relies on fundraising to cover expenses. Monthly expenses include DDoS protection from CloudFlare, hosting Digital Ocean services, email, and other services. Non-recurring expenses were recently incurred from contractors who specialize in development talent for iOS and the trademark opposition effort.

Association board members have assumed expenditures, receiving varying amounts of reimbursement. To meet financial obligations and to support special projects, the association has asked for donations to several of its funds.

When the association opens up membership, there will be a fee structure established to cover operating costs. Donations to the funds listed below will not count toward future membership fees.

Following are the funds:

iOS Development Fund — LfVszG74eZKRxrx2s29rQs3MR2Vvau3LsE

Android Development Fund –LPwViUHsXXKWp65ZxVqag7B3wmbmo4Zfd2

Trademark Fund –LhZLSy6tePUACYaADRyPFcQycESv3wDgRZ

General Operations Fund –LZwZMi6i9suK1wzFaw1NHqcYLcLGAo1Fs3

Developers and Litecoin Association Fund –LXks4nXBkoAgmQ5MCBBqaei2Qkt3Qkm9WS

Litecoin.com — LNYBbaB3CrQ2PxfM9DhNM55GdYPkDvXXxq

Litecoin Core

Litecoin Core, the Litecoin reference client, features “full node” capabilities to validate and download the Litecoin blockchain in addition to wallet functionality to manage transactions. Litecoin Core is the richest client feature, containing all protocols for the network to function.

Merchants, mining pools and services use the client for its stability, features and security.

Litecoin Core v0.13.x will feature protocol level improvements, the ability to roll out several forks simultaneously, code optimizations and segregated witness innovation. Features will include:

● Faster signature validation using the libsecp256k library developed by Bitcoin Core.

● Wallet pruning to reduce block size storage.

● Memory usage improvements including better mempool transaction filtering.

● Inbuilt Tor control socket API support should Tor be run and also stream isolation for Tor communication.

● Functionality to reduce upload traffic.

● Segregated Witness to enable greater transaction output and mitigation of transaction malleability.

● ZMQ support. ZeroMQ is a high-performance asynchronous messaging library that aims at use in distributed concurrent connections. Litecoin will support ZMQ for broadcasting block and transaction data.

● Hierarchical Deterministic wallets. Litecoin Core will support hierarchical deterministic wallets known as HD wallets.

● Obfuscated blockchain data. Several antivirus applications detect the Litecoin stored blockchain data as a malware threat. Litecoin v0.13 will obfuscate the blockchain data to eliminate these false positives.

The update will include several BIPs to ready Litecoin for innovations related to the Lightning Network and develop more complex smart contracts. These BIPs include:

● BIP 9 – Allows multiple soft fork changes to be deployed in parallel.

● BIP 32 – Allows Litecoin Core to support hierarchical deterministic wallets.

● BIP 68 – Allows relative lock time enforcement through sequence numbers.

● BIP 111 – Extends BIP 37, connection Bloom filtering, by defining a service bit to allow peers to advertise that they support Bloom filters explicitly. It also bumps the protocol version to enable peers to identify old nodes that allow Bloom filtering of the connection despite lacking the new service bit.

● BIP 112 – A proposal to redefine the semantics used in determining a time-locked transaction’s eligibility for inclusion in a block. The median of the last 11 blocks is used instead of the block’s timestamp, ensuring that it increases monotonically with each block.

● BIP 113 – Describes a new opcode (CHECKSEQUENCEVERIFY) for the Litecoin scripting system. In combination with BIP 68, it allows execution pathways of a script to be restricted based on the age of the output being spent.

● BIP 130 – Adds a new message, “sendheaders,” which indicates that a node prefers to receive new block announcements via a “headers” message rather than an “inv.”

● BIP 133 – Adds a new message “feefilter” which serves to instruct peers not to send “inv”s to the node for transactions with fees below the specified fee rate.

● BIP 141 – Defines a new structure called a “witness” that is committed to blocks separated from the transaction Merkle tree.

● BIP 143 – Contains the logic for signature verification for the version 0 witness program.

● BIP 144 – Contains the logic for new messages and serialization formats for propagation of transactions and blocks committed to segregated witness structures.

● BIP 152 – Adds compact block relay to reduce the bandwidth required to propagate new blocks.

The version will be released by September or October, according to Litecoin Core developers. Litecoin shares the same P2SH address format at bitcoin; addresses start with a 3. The developers want to introduce a unique P2SH address prefix to eliminate confusion for Litecoin users.

The association congratulated three new core developers who helped with the next update to Litecoin Core at faster speed. There will be future research and development into the flex cap block size limit.

LoafWallet (iOS)

Developers Alexandre Linhares, Franklyn Richards, Loshan T, Adrian Gallagher and Austin Chou introduced LoafWallet, a stand-alone Litecoin client built for iOS that combines simplicity and advanced security into the palm of one’s hand. It is based on the BreadWallet software Litecoin has been working on with creator Aaron Voisine to bring Litecoin to iOS.

LoafWallet connects to the Litecoin network directly to give powerful performance with simple payment verification (SPV mode) since there is no server to go offline or be hacked. LoafWallet is deterministic, enabling users to access accounts with a simple backup phrase on any device that runs the app. Should a user lose their phone, they will not lose their Litecoins.

LoafWallet utilizes app sandboxing and AES hardware encryption as well as code signatures and keychain to protect coins from malware and browser flaws. It provides a more secure experience.

LoadWallet has all the BreadWallet benefits and can be downloaded free on the App Store.

The team has started to work on improvements to the base LoafWallet experience, including:

● Simplified Code

● Improved UX/UI

● Live Price Conversion

● Improved Menu system

● Support For Apple Watch

● Filter Options for Transactions

● Improved scaling for larger devices

● Purchase Litecoin within Application

● Litecoin Statistics

● iOS 10 Features (use Siri to send and receive Litecoins – and send Litecoin to friends through iMessage)

More information is available about future development is available on the GitHub page at https://github.com/litecoin-association/LoafWallet.

Electrum-LTC (Android+PC)

Electrum-LTC offers a wallet option for Litecoin users that is bringing Electrum for Litecoin to Android, marking a new step in user choice and Litecoin functionality. It uses a 12-word seed that allows users to access their existing wallet and manage funds on the go.

Like its desktop counterpart, Electrum for Litecoin offers:

● An indexed copy of the Litecoin blockchain stored on Electrum-LTC servers for speed.

● Freedom to export private keys and move one’s wallet into another Litecoin client.

● 12-word seeds to recover a wallet across multiple devices in case of theft or loss.

● Cold storage for storing private keys offline, another layer of security.

● Transaction verification via simple payment verification.

● Encrypted private keys for security.

● No downtime on the network.

Electrum-LTC for Android will be available in late July.

With the latest desktop 2.6.4.2 release, Electrum-LTC users experienced a minor update focusing on repairing bugs mostly concerned with the command line interface.

Developers have begun working on an improved UX/UI proposal for Electrum to improve both Litecoin and bitcoin versions. The improvements will simplify and unite the mobile and desktop platforms through a shared design philosophy.

LiteTip

LiteTip, the official Litecoin tipbot, is designed for use across social media platforms. It shut down on account of technical issues after community member/u/zipzo on Reddit maintained it. /u/zipzo handed over control and entrusted future development of LiteTip to the association. LiteTip is once again working, and future improvements are planned.

Litecoin Node

Litecoin Node, an open source project conceived by Losh11, makes it possible for individuals to maintain and deploy Litecoin supernodes. To run a Litecoin supernode, one only has to run the script and answer some questions posed in the terminal.

LiteVault V2

LiteVault. Org is a wallet that association developer Chris (someguy123) runs. Part two of this service includes multi-signature support, multiple language internalization (support for Chinese and Russian), conversions from Litecoin to bitcoin and vice versa, and other improvements.

Litecoinaverage

Litecoinaverage.com was released on June 30, demonstrating the community’s continuing support for the Litecoin ecosystem. Examples of how Bitcoinaverage has helped the bitcoin community include:

● Bitcoin Android Wallet

● Purse.io Bitcoin Marketplace

● Mycelium Wallet

● LocalBitcoins (Buy/Sell Bitcoins)

● Lamassu Bitcoin ATM

● Green Address

Lamassu ATM

The association will port Litecoin to the Lamassu ATMs, thereby improving accessibility to Litecoin. This will make it easier for more users to enter the Litecoin market. The ATM operators will be able to change which cryptocurrencies – bitcoin and Litecoin – they accept.

Images from Shutterstock and Litecoin.