- Possible introduction of a velvet fork could create a bridge between Cardano (ADA) and Litecoin (LTC) blockchain.
- In conjunction with the NiPoPoWs the upgrade of Litecoin would allow the voluntary participation of miners with the Cardano network.
Following the bullish sentiment in the market, Litecoin and Cardano have had a week of significant gains. At the time of publication, ADA and LTC reached their annual highs at $0.16 and $89.52 respectively. In the introduction to the Litening webinar series, Litecoin Foundation director David Schwartz spoke about a project with great potential to further boost the price of the cryptocurrencies.
The project is the construction of a “bridge” between the blockchains of Litecoin and Cardano. In mid-July, Cardano inventor Charles Hoskinson contacted Litecoin’s inventor, Charlie Lee, with the proposal. In a later publication, Schwartz explained that communication between the networks could be implemented with a velvet fork. That way, changes could be made to the base code without requiring majority consensus.
This method, according to the director of the Litecoin Foundation, would be applied in conjunction with a NiPoPoWs or Non-Interactive Proof-of-Work. Thus, participants in Litecoin’s network can voluntarily choose whether to adopt the changes introduced in the velvet fork. The blocks validated with this update have “backward compatibility” and work perfectly with the blocks that operate without the update. The director of the Litecoin Foundation added:
It will allow clients that upgrade to the new rules to still be compatible with those that do not, and adds no rule modifications to the consensus layer. In other words, Pool A decides to use the velvet fork that allows for cross-chain communications, etc., but Pool B does not. It will not affect either pool, and they can still accept each other’s blocks.
Decision of the Cardano and Litecoin community
Also participating in the webinar was Dionysis Zindros, a blockchain researcher from the University of Athens. Together with Schwartz, Zindros explained that the implementation of a velvet fork and a NiPoPoWs have few technical difficulties. At the academic institution Zindros belongs, they have already implemented a velvet fork in a Bitcoin Cash test network successfully.
Therefore, webinar participants agreed that the biggest difficulty is getting community approval. However, the researcher and the director of the Litecoin Foundation were optimistic about the acceptance that an initiative like the proposal will have in the communities.
Cardano is developing the components of the Goguen era. In the most recent updates, the multiple teams working on the development of Cardano have presented progress in the implementation of new functionalities such as financial contracts, smart contracts, support for multiple tokens, decentralized governance, among others. IOHK will start with the first phase of deployment on the Cardano mainnet soon. A bridge with Litecoin’s blockchain could bring benefits to both communities and increase the value of the assets operating in the networks.