It’s official. Litecoin, one of the oldest and biggest altcoins by market cap, deployed Segregated Witness (SegWit) today. The protocol upgrade that was originally developed for Bitcoin and proposed by the Bitcoin Core  development team locked in on Litecoin two weeks ago, and was enforced  by a majority of hash power on the Litecoin network as of a couple of  hours ago.

The Segregated Witness soft fork activated without  major issues — though there was an early slip up by the biggest Litecoin  mining pool on the network.

“F2Pool had a hiccup where they were  not mining Litecoin correctly. For some reason their LTC pool was  returning a BTC template to miners. We reached out to them and they  fixed it right away,” Litecoin inventor Charlie Lee told Bitcoin Magazine.

SegWit

Launched in 2011, Litecoin was one of the first altcoins to gain significant traction. As opposed to some newer altcoins like Ethereum, Ripple and Monero,  Litecoin is a straight fork of Bitcoin’s codebase but with a different  mining algorithm and some changed parameters, such as faster  confirmation times. This similarity to Bitcoin does mean that Litecoin  suffers from similar weaknesses as Bitcoin, like transaction malleability.

 And, indeed, that it can adopt similar solutions and improvements, like Segregated Witness.

While  Litecoin inventor Charlie Lee has been advocating for activation of the  soft fork since late 2016, miner support initially did not follow. This  changed following the Global LTC Roundtable Meeting, an online meeting  held amongst prominent stakeholders in the Litecoin industry, who are  based particularly in China. The participants agreed on “Litecoin Global Roundtable Resolution 001 (2017),” which, among other things, holds that the mining pools would activate SegWit.

With  its SegWit activation, the “silver to Bitcoin’s gold” has immediately  reclaimed a place in the spotlight, and the markets have been taking  notice. Having lingered in Bitcoin’s shadow for years at price levels  below $5, Litecoin’s exchange rate surged almost tenfold in anticipation  of SegWit. The altcoin reached almost $40 today and is trading around  $33 at time of publication.

Bitcoin

Perhaps even more important, some prominent Bitcoin projects — like .NET Bitcoin library NBitcoin and wallet mSIGNA — announced to port their work to Litecoin now that it has enabled SegWit. Even more notable, Lightning Labs will roll out a version of their lightning network implementation on Litecoin, while ACINQ has tested their lightning software on the altcoin, too. Similarly, Bitcoin Core developer Johnson Lau, one of the authors of SegWit, has indicated that he will realize smart-contracting solution MAST on Litecoin.

 Further down the road, Segregated Witness enables more innovations that could be deployed on Litecoin first. Confidential Transactions, Schnorr signatures and TumbleBit are all in the works for Bitcoin, and shouldn’t take too much effort to port to Litecoin.

 Lee himself, furthermore, hopes  that atomic swaps will soon see the light of day, enabling an instant  and trustless altcoin exchange and lightning network type of  transactions across different digital currencies. 

“SegWit opens  up the doors to many amazing features that can be added to Litecoin,”  Lee said. “These include Lightning Network, MAST, Confidential  Transactions, Schnorr Signatures and more. I think Litecoin can show  Bitcoin that SegWit is indeed the best way to improve the protocol. So I  think it will help get that happening sooner on Bitcoin.

”Segregated  Witness is still pending activation on Bitcoin, where it requires 95  percent hash power support. It has stagnated at around 30 percent so far.