Litecoin SegWit Support Reaches 70%, Market Cap Increases by $140 Million Overnight

The Litecoin network appears to be on the cusp of a SegWit technology upgrade that would increase the capacity of the network.

As of press time, more than 70% of Litecoin’s mining power has voted in favor of Segregated Witness (SW), an innovation that was first and foremost a scaling solution for the Bitcoin blockchain, but has yet to gain the support of a majority of Bitcoin miners.

Litecoin is only about 5% away from the 75% hashrate activation threshold for SegWit. In comparison, only 31% of Bitcoin miners have voted in favor of SegWit.

Notably, Litecoin first opened up SegWit voting to miners on February 3, roughly three months after the SegWit code was released.

At present, the two major mining pools of the entire Litecoin network have not voted in favor of Segregated Witness, and their stance will ultimately determine whether Segregated Witness of Litecoin can be activated.

Currently, LTC1BTC and BW.com account for about 22% of Litecoin’s total network computing power (12.2% and 9.8% respectively), which means that as long as one of the two mining pools votes in favor of Segregated Witness, there is hope that Segregated Witness will be activated for Litecoin.

Other mining companies that did not vote for the technology upgrade include Bitmain AntPool, LTC.Top, WeMineLTC, and ProHashing.

Background of the controversy

However, whether Litecoin can eventually activate Segregated Witness may not be so easy at present.

First, it seems unlikely that the Litecoin Pool will risk voting for Segregated Witness. Jiang Zhuoer, the founder of Litecoin Pool, recently stated in a media interview that Litecoin Pool will not support Segregated Witness. He also said that he thinks other large mining pools are unlikely to do so.

In addition, even if the activation threshold of Segregated Witness (75% hashrate) is reached, it will take 8064 blocks (based on Litecoin’s 2.5-minute block rate, this will take about两周). In other words, there may be a situation where the activation threshold is met but the required time cannot be maintained, and then Litecoin’s Segregated Witness will still not be activated.

Even so, Litecoin founder Charlie Lee still supports the activation of Segregated Witness. He even suggested that Chinese mining pools adopt Segregated Witness in an open letter.

Lee wrote:

“I believe the market is waiting for Litecoin to activate SegWit and when that happens, the price of Litecoin will respond positively. It is frustrating to see other altcoins soaring while Litecoin is not moving at all. Let’s give the market what the market wants.”

Investors appeared to respond positively to the news.

After the Segregated Witness vote, Litecoin traders pushed the price of Litecoin to $11.17. The current market value of Litecoin has reached $559 million. The market value of Litecoin increased by about $140 million overnight.