A big increase of Litecoin mining is being planned by a group of developers who call themselves SegWit or Segregated Witness Signaling. SegWit has launched a new mining protocol; or soft fork that is making hundreds of new blocks of Litecoin available for mining.

The latest SegWit mining started on the morning of April 3, 2017, just 24 hours later 2,256 new blocks of litecoin had been mined, Litecoinblockhalf.com website reported. That’s only the beginning because another 1,776 blocks are being targeted for mining.

Since there are 50 litecoins in a block that means 201,600 litecoins will be mined during the latest expansion which has apparently been successful. There were around 43.5 million litecoins in circulation on December 18, 2015, according to Coindesk.

If the Segwit effort is successful, the litecoin mined will be worth 1,310.4 bitcoins or $1.498 million. A litecoin was worth .0065 bitcoins or $7.43 on April 2, 2017, Livebitcoinnews reported. Bitcoins were trading at $1,142.92 apiece on April 4, 2017.

The Segwit appears to be Achieving its Goals

Segwit activation threshold is 75% which means we could witness segwit activation very soon. This seems to indicate that Segwit is achieving its goals of increasing the amount of Litecoin in circulation and the transactional capacity of the Cryptocurrency by expanding Litecoin’s data storage capabilities.

Much of Segwit success comes from the decision of a group called F2Pool to join in the SegWit signal, Coindesk reported. Around 576 blocks of litecoin; or 28,800 litecoins, now have direct Segwit and CSV miner support, according Litecoinblockhalf.com

More LiteCoin SoftForks coming

During the same period three new soft forks; bip314, bip66, and bip65 were activated. There are also plans to activate at least two more soft forks.

A soft fork is a major change to a cryptocurrency; that makes some previous blocks invalid and make new blocks of the digital money available. The usual goal of such a fork is to make mining easier and increase the amount of currency in circulation.

SegWit started as an effort to make changes to bitcoin but it was largely rejected by most bitcoin nodes and major digital wallets like Coinbase. Its creators have apparently moved on to Litecoin in an attempt to scale that currency up to make it into a serious competitor and alternative to bitcoin and etherum.

Interest in and Trading of Litecoin is increasing

There has been a lot of increased interest in litecoin in recent weeks because the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) granted Coinbase permission to trade Litecoin on March 27, Investopedia reported. Coinbase also received SEC permission to start trading another cryptocurrency called Ether on the same day.

Coinbase has also received permission to trade litecoin options in New York State from the Department of Financial Services (DFS). This makes it easier for Americans to buy and sell litecoin, which should expand the market for it.

The combination of new trading options and the SegWit soft fork should increase interest in Litecoin and its volatility. Litecoin might soon experience the kind of massive price increases that Etherum has seen in recent weeks. Etherum was trading at $10.74 a coin on February 1, 2017, and $45.20 a coin on April 4, 2017, according to Coinbase data.