Litecoin Sees Increased Development Amidst Surging Price Rally
Ben Davenport, the chief technical officer at BitGo, the leading multi-signature technology-based service provider which works with some of the largest bitcoin exchanges and trading platforms such as Kraken, revealed that the company has begun to support Litecoin and provide security services for the Litecoin platforms.
Over the past few years, BitGo has been at the forefront of bitcoin and blockchain security, securing widely-utilized trading platforms with its multi-signature technology. Currently, BitGo processes over $1 billion worth of bitcoin payments on a monthly basis of its clients including South Korea’s second largest digital currency exchange Korbit, major US-based bitcoin exchanges Kraken and Bitstamp, leading Indian bitcoin exchange Unocoin and popular bitcoin service provider Wirex.
Charlie Lee, the creator of Litecoin who recently resigned from his position as Coinbase director of engineering to solely focus on the development and innovation of Litecoin, emphasized that the decision of the BitGo development team to implement Litecoin and provide multi-signature security services for Litecoin-based platforms and service providers is a major step for the Litecoin community and industry.
On June 19, Bitstamp, the eighth largest Litecoin trading platform within the US Litecoin exchange market, announced the integration of BitGo’s Litecoin multi-signature security service. Although the vast majority of Litecoin trading are processed within the Chinese Litecoin exchange market and Bitstamp only accounts for a fraction of global Litecoin trading, it is the first case in which a major international digital currency trading platform has integrated BitGo’s security services to secure Litecoin transactions.
CryptoCoinsNews previously reported that the activation of the Bitcoin Core development team’s transaction malleability fix Segregated WItness (Segwit) led to an increase in the demand for LItecoin and a significant surge in development. Within months after the activation of Segwit, Litecoin creator Charlie Lee announced his resignation and his intent to focus on the development of LItecoin full time, which further increased the expectation of the cryptocurrency community and market toward Litecoin.
Since the resignation of Lee, Litecoin hasn’t seen major changes to its protocol and its development roadmap. However, Lee played a critical role in bringing the Litecoin mining community into consensus to activate Segwit and as a result, the demand toward Litecoin as well as its market cap surged substantially.
Within three months, Litecoin’s market cap increased from $200 million to a staggering $2.5 billion, recording a 1,150 three-month increase. In that short period of time, Litecoin has also become the fourth most valuable cryptocurrency in the world by market cap, surpassing Ethereum Classic, Dash and NEM.
More importantly, the mid-term increase in the market cap of Litecoin, the activation of Segwit, successful testing of Lightning on Litecoin, issuance of services by companies such as BitGo and the shift in focus from Litecoin creator Charlie Lee further triggered the development community of Litecon.
Recently, it was discovered that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is set to release a Litecoin technology in 39 days, by August 1, the exact same day a section of the bitcoin community expects to see a chain split. In an interview, South African technology entrepreneur Vinny Lingham explained:
“[bitcoin price] It should have stayed down there [low $1,000 region] a lot longer and the reason for that is that there are some technical limitations in Bitcoin around scaling, which is coming to the fore now on 1 August. So, 1 August you’re potentially going to have a chain split and a hard fork and a couple other technical nightmares that may happen on that day, or in that week, which would make it … you know, you don’t want to spend Bitcoins that week at all, otherwise, you’d lose.”