A dramatic overnight increase in hashrate is taking place in the Litecoin world. An insider told 8btc that the hashrate of LTC1BTC, a Litecoin pool, increased from less than 300 GH/S on April 17 to over 700 GH/S on April 18, while LTC TOP increased from 150 GH/S to 500G. With the rise of hashrate, support for Segwit dropped from 80 percent to a new low of 70 percent.

For Segwit to be fully activated on Litecoin, it needs over 75 percent support from miners during that two- week period. If it fails to maintain the 75% support threshold for 14 days, even if the initial threshold of 75 percent was met, Segwit will not be activated on Litecoin. As Litecoin is moving within 5 percent of its Segwit activation threshold, some doubt the intent behind the sudden increase is to prevent litecoin activating segwit.

Jiang Zhuoer, the owner of both LTC1BTC and LTC.TOP, claimed that he won’t upgrade to softfork SegWit, nor will primary Litecoin pools like LTC1BTC and LTC.TOP.

Bitcoin users at 8btc assumed that Bitmain should claim responsibility for the sudden hashrate increase in Litecoin.

On April 18, Bitmain announced that because of firmware bugs, the L3 +Order that should be shipped out around April 4.15-20 is delayed.

But some users are not buying this, assuming that Bitmain is deliberately trying to stop Litecoin Segwit using L3’s hashrate. And on April 17, Bitmain’s mining pool Antpool’s hashrate abruptly surged by around 20 percent in a period of few hours, from 200 to nearly 500 GH/S. It could completely coincidental but insiders revealed that on April 13 about 1000 Bitmain L3 LTC mining machines were deployed at mining pools without being delivered to customers.

Litecoin’s Hashrate to Double?

On April 19, when be asked what the sudden increase was all about, Wang Chun said that was just a small spike.

He also revealed what Wu Jihan has been up to.

If the chips are made into machines, will SegWit still be activated on Litecoin?