Activation for the segwit soft fork is being managed using BIP9. At the beginning of the first retarget period after segwit's start date of 1 January 2017 miners can update the Litecoin client to Litecoin Core 0.13.2 to signal for segwit support. When a super-majority of 75% is reached segwit is activated by optional, and

if 75% of blocks within a 8,064-block retarget period (about 3.5 days) signal support for segwit, after another 8,064 blocks, segwit will be required.

Well it seems like the rumors were correct, Litecoin will be implementing a soft-fork to activate the Segregated Witness protocol, also referred as Segwit. Even though some may consider this change unnecessary given that LTC´s network is far from congested, it represents a great testing environment for those who advocate Segwit for Bitcoin.

If this soft-fork gets approved by the miners, not only LTC block capacity will increase by 70% but it would also represent the first step towards the future implementation of the Lightning Network, which means instant and cross-chain transactions.

The expectations of Segwit in LTC is probably the main reason behind the surge of LTC´s price from $3.72 to $4.59 in a week.

It is now on the hand of miners to decide whether or not the new protocol gets implemented, chinese miners if I may add.