Charlie Lee Announces New Technical Developments On Litecoin

Litecoin founder Charlie Lee had stated earlier this year he will be focusing on increasing the use of the ninth-largest cryptocurrency in the market. Users could use 3-addresses before but that could be confused with addresses of BTC.

Litecoin Migration to M Addresses

He recently announced on Twitter the migration of Litecoin users to using M addresses. “We are trying to get the whole Litecoin ecosystem migrated to using M-addresses for LTC multisig/segwit addresses and stop using 3-addresses,” he explained through his official Twitter handle.

We are trying to get the whole Litecoin ecosystem migrated to using M-addresses for LTC multisig/segwit addresses and stop using 3-addresses.

Help me fill out this table: https://t.co/KNTpKpiCpo

Test your exchanges/wallets/explorers and let me know what you find. 👊

— Charlie Lee Ⓜ️🕸️ (@SatoshiLite) December 22, 2018

Typically, LTC address types are prefixed with the number “3”, like on Bitcoin. Litecoin, as a fork of Bitcoin, by default has the same format. Sadly, this can lead to confusion with users who accidentally send Bitcoin to P2SH Litecoin addresses or accidentally send Litecoin to P2SH Bitcoin addresses.

So, the Litecoin community developed a new address format. It prefix with M, a format that might not be valid on Bitcoin. The underlying private and public key pair are the same, but the hashing algorithm for displaying the public key is altered. This means that 3- and M- addresses are both interchangeable for movement of funds on the Litecoin blockchain. This simple change drastically reduces cases of erroneous cross-chain transfers.

Charlie Lee said on Twitter that the format of an M address would look like this: MW5BfXhYVstHt1fmXg167PTKkpphfP6xQ3. The community is now trying to get all LTC users to migrate to this new address format.

Other Technical Developments on Litecoin

Lee announced his decision to sell all of his LTC holdings on Dec. 20, 2017, a day after the token reached a record high of about $375. The value of the coin has fallen ever since and is now trading at around $30.

However, rather than dwelling on his fortuitous decision a year ago to sell all his holdings at the height of the digital-asset market bubble, he has given his time to technical development on the network.

The LF has formalized a collaboration with @X9developers of @XSNofficial in the maintenance, and hardening of ltcd. They’ve recently brought ltcd up to speed with btcd. This enables #litecoin support on neutrino, a light LN client. Read more here: https://t.co/cPeCMGZ6qK

— Litecoin Foundation ⚡️ (@LTCFoundation) December 20, 2018

Also, in a new development, Zap Desktop now has LTC support, according to Charlie Lee. Zap now supports connecting to remote Litecoin Lightning nodes. Zap Desktop is a cross-platform Lightning Network wallet. The user can use to send bitcoin (now LTC also) instantly with minimal fees.

To aid LTC’s movement to the Lightning Network, the Litecoin Foundation announced a collaboration with X9 Developers in the maintenance, debugging, and hardening of ltcd and potentially other Lightning Network(LN) technologies. X9 Developers are a blockchain developer team.

The Foundation in the public release said X9 Developers “have already implemented a beta version of cross-chain atomic swaps via the Lightning Network available for testing between XSN and LTC.” Also, that the development team will now switch focus to improvement in the user experience of the LN. They will develop a “one click” solution for LN atomic swaps.

The work by the X9 Developers would also enable Litecoin support on neutrino, a Lightning Network light client. Even though LTC has lost most of its value this year, these technical developments are a major cause for optimism for 2019.

How did you like this article? Please let us know so that we can better customize your reading experience.