Litecoin successfully activated Segregated Witness, is Lightning Network next?

A long-debated technical upgrade originally intended to improve Bitcoin has now been successfully implemented on another cryptocurrency network, Litecoin.

Segregated Witness (SegWit), one of the proposals in the bitcoin scaling debate, has now been given a chance to experiment on litecoin, or as its supporters argue, this will help reveal whether these technical upgrades are effective for bitcoin.

The first lock of Litecoin Segregated Witness was two weeks ago. After more than two weeks of waiting, Segregated Witness was officially activated in the 1201536th block of Litecoin.

What does this mean? Litecoin users can now use a new transaction method called Segregated Witness, and at press time, several such transactions have already occurred on the Litecoin network.

However, most supporters are looking forward to the deployment of new technologies after the implementation of Segregated Witness, such as the Lightning Network, which can theoretically boost Litecoin's transaction throughput to millions of times per second.

Litecoin developer Loshan T told reporters:

“I think today is a great day for Litecoin, with more exciting technologies coming to Litecoin. With SegWit activated on Litecoin mainnet, I’m excited to see the next deployments of Confidential Transactions, Lightning, MAST, and Schnorr signatures.”

However, these projects are still in very early stages. At least in the view of developers at startup Lightning Labs, it is too early to send funds through the still-experimental network, and they plan to continue to improve their code.

Uncertain future

Segregated Witness has been successfully activated on the Litecoin network. It is not yet clear what impact it will have and what role Litecoin will play in the future.

Loshan mentioned that some onlookers believe that Litecoin does not actually need the Lightning Network because its transaction blocks are far from full at the moment. But he noted that developers believe that trustless cross-chain transactions between Bitcoin and Litecoin as a potential Lightning Network application could benefit both cryptocurrencies.

One of the things is that in order to support this type of transaction, wallets will need to be upgraded. For example, the multi-signature wallet mSIGNA has already done this.

Additionally, market observers have concerns about the activation of SegWit, some logistical and some political. Earlier high-level analysis has shown that developers are not sure whether all miners and exchanges will be fully prepared for this technical change.

Time will tell if these concerns are justified. At least for an hour after SegWit was successfully activated, Litecoin seemed to be functioning normally.