Litecoin Pool, the longest running Litecoin mining pool has just expanded its donation options to allow its members to donate a percentage of their block rewards to the Litecoin Foundation (LF), a Singapore based non profit lead by Litecoin Creator Charlie Lee.

LitecoinPool had previously allowed their participants to donate to the pool and its upkeep. Following a recent suggestion Lee made in response to the BCH infrastructure proposal or block tax, where Lee stated he believed ‘a better way to fund development is mining pools voluntarily donate’, LitecoinPool has done just that, making them the first for Litecoin specifically, to implement the feature. Upon hearing the news, Lee announced the change on twitter writing:

“Litecoin Pool now has a setting that lets miners voluntarily donate any percent to Litecoin Foundation. If you are mining at @ltcpool, consider donating 1% to @LTCFoundation. Hope to see more pools giving miners this option!”

There had also been suggestions of other groups or organisations in the space potentially being added to such a list, we asked pooler who founded and runs LitecoinPool what his plans were in this regard and he told us:

“More options could be added in the future, if there is enough demand.”

The LF, while certainly the largest entity in the Litecoin ecosystem is not the same as the ‘Litecoin Core Project’, which is the group that develops and maintains the Core implementation of Litecoin which makes up the majority of the network. Although the two have close ties the LF acts as more of a middle man, as such these donations if significant may give the LF greater influence and say over Core.

When asked if people are already donating Pooler responded:

“Yes some miners are already donating to the LF. These donations will be batched by LitecoinPool and paid out at the end of each month.”

LitecoinPool has a history of allowing its members autonomy over their decision making, notably with Segwit each user was allowed to decide how their block would signal. It seems a similar approach has been taken here with no top down decision making. When asked if this donation option would ever potentially be turned into an opt-out rather than an opt in, in order to greatly increase this development funding, Pooler told us:

“Personally i definitely prefer having this as an opt-in to stress the voluntary aspect of the donations.”

The move has received much positive feedback and looks to be a good first step, although it is unclear how many others, if any, will follow suit and if these donations are significant enough to make a real impact.