DETROIT – Nine years ago, almost to the day, Litecoin was formed after a fork off of the Bitcoin blockchain. It’s original premise was to become the cryptocurrency of choice to make everyday purchases. The reason for this was the lethargic processing times of Bitcoin which threatened to make it irrelevant since it would be too much of a burden to use for an ordinary purchase.
Charlie Lee, an ex Google employee, came up with the idea to fork off of the blockchain and make a lightweight coin that could handle faster transactions. It also created a few innovations that the bitcoin blockchain was not capable of.
In this article, we will take a look back on Litecoin and the other coins it has spawned to see how things are going for the not-so-new coin.
Lack of development
Though Litecoin did fulfill its promise to speed up processing, it hasn’t been adopted by the masses just yet. One of the reasons is that the Litecoin community is becoming frustrated with the lack of developments. For instance, there are few and far between commits on GitHub with regards to Litecoin so it seems the developers are not working on any innovations.
A quick glance at the last year of LTC to BTC trends shows that the value is dropping against bitcoin.
This is unfortunate as early on it was known for its innovative team of developers. They instituted SegWit (Segregated Witness) which is what led to the speed of transactions. The signature data is removed from the block and processed separately which sped up the process considerably.
Then, Atomic Swaps were implemented which allowed for users to trade assets without needing to log in so nobody’s identity would be compromised.
Sadly, these types of innovations don’t seem to be on the horizon for Litecoin.
The new coins it created
To fill the gap that Litecoin wasn’t able to, some other forks were made that created some new coins. Monacoin is one such coin that was created to be used primarily as a peer to peer payment system. It is very popular in Japan but has failed to take off in other parts of the world. As a result its value has dropped to a little over $1 at the time of this article.
A more successful fork was made to create Litecoin Cash. It also hoped to speed up the transaction processing time by offering an even more lightweight coin and simpler blocks. Not only that but it made the mining of Litecoin much faster and easier to do.
Cloakcoin is addressing the very reason that cryptocurrency was created in the first place. Complete anonymity with payments and financing. It has a privacy protocol called enigma that blends an extra layer of encryption with some other unique mixing systems.
Lastly, Feathercoin was created just like Litecoin Cash to improve the mining process to speed up the process even further. Like the other coins, it hasn’t really taken off as an alternative to Litecoin.
*This article has been contributed on behalf of Paxful. However, the information provided herein is not intended to be, investment, financial, or other advice.