Segwit Locks In on Litecoin, Will Activate

Litecoin has surpassed the required number of signaling blocks needed to activate Segregated Witness (Segwit) on Wednesday. Segwit is therefore locked in on Litecoin. “After Segwit is locked-in, it will activate,” wrote Segwit’s development team.

Also read: Litecoin Reaches Round Table Resolution for Protocol Upgrade

Segwit Locked In

Early on Wednesday, Litecoin creator Charlie Lee tweeted: “Segwit on Litecoin will be locked in in ~19 hours, but we already reached the required number (6048) of signaling blocks.” His tweet shortly followed the official Litecoin channel’s tweet.

The activation threshold for Segwit on Litecoin was set to 75 percent by its development team. Specifically, “6048 out of 8064 (75%) blocks are required to reach ‘locked_in’ status,” the Litecoin tracking site Litecoinblockhalf explains. The site shows that currently 6328 out of 7911 or 79.99% of blocks are signaling for Segwit, adding that “after another activation period, Segwit will become active.”

In the meantime, all miners and nodes are encouraged to upgrade their software to the latest version. The development team behind Segwit wrote:

After Segwit is locked-in, it will activate. That means all full nodes running Segwit-aware code will begin requiring miners to enforce the new Segwit consensus rules.

The Road to Segwit Activation

In February, Litecoin developers led by Charlie Lee initiated the push to add Segwit to their cryptocurrency. However, instead of closely following Bitcoin’s activation plan, the Litecoin team decided to lower the activation threshold from 95 percent down to 75 percent.

Last week, Bitcoin.com reported on the Litecoin community’s Global Roundtable meeting. A resolution was reached during the event between several major mining pool operators and exchanges that trade Litecoins. They agreed to establish the groundwork for consensus which allows Segwit to be activated.

Responding to the news of Segwit’s pending activation, the price of Litecoin jumped from $4 per LTC at the end of March to nearly $16 at the time of writing, taking its market capitalization to approximately $743 million.

Other Altcoins Adopting Segwit

Litecoin will not be the first cryptocurrency to add Segwit to their source code. A much smaller altcoin called Groestlcoin has already adopted the change on their mainnet. The three-year-old crypto has a $1.6 million market cap. It trades for less than three US cents but has been busy growing over the years. In January, the Groestlcoin admins updated the code to include Segwit, and by their 3rd anniversary near the end of March, Segwit was activated.

Another altcoin, Vertcoin, could follow shortly behind Litecoin if they stay on schedule with their User Activated Soft Fork (UASF) to activate Segwit on Vertcoin at midnight on May 31. Currently, the majority of mining power for the cryptocurrency is not signaling for Segwit but the developers and the community are pushing ahead for Segwit regardless.

Meanwhile, other altcoins such as Viacoin, Syscoin and Digibyte have also added Segwit to their development roadmaps.

Lightning on Litecoin

Both Litecoin and Groestlcoin have started working on what comes next after implementing Segwit: deploying the Lightning Network (LN). On Tuesday, French Bitcoin technology company Acinq announced that they have tested their lightning network on the Litecoin testnet, which has been running Segwit for weeks. “With eclair 0.2-alpha3 to be released, we looked at what was needed to make it run on Litecoin,” the startup wrote before exclaiming:

TL;DR We ran eclair on Litecoin (testnet) and it worked. We didn’t even have to change the code!

“In fact, it worked out of the box, all we had to do is change a few configuration parameters,” Acinq claims. While there are some things left to be fine tuned, they believe that “it is very possible that the first LN payment carrying real value will be made on Litecoin.”

What do you think about Litecoin activating Segwit? Let us know in the comments section below.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock, Segwit, Twitter, Highcharts.com, Groestlcoin, Acinq and Charlie Lee

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