Litecoin releases future development roadmap: smart contracts and atomic cross-chain swaps as the focus

Riding on the wave of recent success, the Litecoin Foundation and Litecoin Core have released a new Litecoin development roadmap outlining development plans for the next 12 months.

The roadmap comes at a time when Litecoin is in the spotlight after a long period of silence.

Earlier this month, the Litecoin network activated the scaling solution Segregated Witness (Segwit), which brought renewed attention to the cryptocurrency. Also this month, Coinbase, one of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges, announced that it would add support for Litecoin transactions, which helped Litecoin, which has been in the shadow of Bitcoin and Ethereum, to regain some ground.

Thanks to its technological and commercial progress, the price of Litecoin (LTC) has now reached as high as $30, while it was hovering around $5 a year ago.

Capitalizing on this momentum, the Litecoin roadmap lays out plans to expand the open community and encourage wider user adoption, making the cryptocurrency more accessible to newcomers. The roadmap also details several goals for implementing cutting-edge technologies originally designed for Bitcoin.

When asked about the focus of this roadmap, Litecoin founder and Litecoin Foundation Managing Director Charlie Lee responded.

The key points Lee mentioned are: smart contracts and atomic cross-chain exchanges.

Smart Contracts

This is perhaps unsurprising, as Litecoin’s exploration of smart contracts began long before Ethereum began to gain traction — Ethereum’s most famous capability is smart contracts.

Smart contracts allow cryptocurrency users to set if-then conditions around what they want to do with their money. Smart contracts have also gained popularity on Bitcoin, with several projects already developing plans to try to bring smart contract functionality to the Bitcoin network.

Litecoin, based on a fork of the bitcoin code, already enables some simple smart contracts, such as multi-signatures — where both parties in a transaction need to sign a payment.

But the activation of Segwit has opened the door to more complex scripts.

That said, one part of the roadmap that Lee is particularly excited about is the “Smart Crypto-Vault.” This technology combines MAST (Merkelized abstract syntax trees) with Covenants — script combinations that restrict cryptocurrency payments.

Taken together, they could allow Litecoin users to add more complex payment conditions to smart contracts, much like Ethereum.

Created by former Bitcoin developer Johnson Lau (who defected to Litecoin after Litecoin activated Segwit), MAST also improves scalability and enhances privacy. Lau has reportedly been trying to implement MAST on the Bitcoin network for some time, but joined Litecoin due to frustration with Bitcoin’s political divisions.

Lightning Network

In addition to smart contracts, Litecoin founder Charlie Lee also emphasized that he intends to "do everything possible" to accelerate the deployment of the Lightning Network on Litecoin. Last month, several teams have begun actively testing the Lightning Network, an off-chain payment solution originally designed for Bitcoin.

But Lee has a bigger vision, saying he sees the Lightning Network as a stepping stone toward another long-awaited technology: atomic cross-chain swaps.

Once Lightning is live on a second blockchain besides Litecoin — Vetcoin recently activated Segwit — cross-chain atomic swaps between the two chains will become possible. (Atomic swaps allow users on two different blockchains to exchange tokens without a middleman.)

As part of this, Lee envisions a day when all cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, Monero, etc.) will be unconnected. He said:

“All of this technology will be in the background and you won’t actually care what you’re using.”

But this change cannot happen overnight.

Lee said:

“It’s a slow process. Most Lightning project teams have no incentive to test it on another altcoin. Once they know Lightning works well on Litecoin, we’ll look at whether we can achieve an atomic cross-chain swap.”

Wallet Support

Litecoin is also planning to create its own consumer infrastructure to make it easier for users to send and receive Litecoin.

To this end, the good news is that Litecoin is planning to upgrade its independent Android mobile wallet.

Meanwhile, LoafWallet, developed in collaboration with the Bitcoin Breadwallet team, will soon add support for the Coinbase Buy Widget. LoafWallet is a Simple Payment Verification (SPV) wallet designed for easy mobile use.

The widget will allow newbies to buy small amounts of Litecoin without having to go through the process of setting up a Coinbase account.

Another upgrade being worked on is the release of a new version of the Electrum-LTC desktop wallet, an SPV wallet available for Windows, Linux, and OS X operating systems.

Litecoin also supports hardware wallets Ledger and Trezor.

Future Work

Key to the success of any cryptocurrency is having a critical mass of developers dedicated to developing the code. Along these lines, the Litecoin Foundation (formed earlier this year to replace the Litecoin Association) aims to raise funds for development work.

In addition to actively seeking donations, the foundation is selling Litecoin-branded products to raise funds. The group already has enough funds to hire two new full-time developers.

Lee said:

“We are actually paying the salaries of those litecoin workers.”

In addition, Litecoin has developed a list of projects, including Schnorr signatures and confidential transactions. Both projects are in the research and development stage, but they hope to be deployed. Lee also said that his team is looking at some potential expansion solutions, and "flex caps" are under consideration. As the name suggests, flexible caps refer to flexible block size limits.

Lee said:

“Litecoin does not currently require a scaling solution, but we are researching it.”

Indeed, maybe Litecoin doesn’t need a scaling solution right now, but if it continues on its current path, it may need one soon.