Once heralded as the "silver to bitcoin’s gold", the developers behind the long-running digital currency litecoin are seeking to reestablish the project’s prior position as the world’s second most popular cryptocurrency.
Breaking a long lull in project announcements, litecoin’s core developers and the Litecoin Association , a Texas-based non-profit advocacy group for the technology, revealed a new roadmap earlier this summer. Far from a dramatic change in course, it seeks to reinvigorate a project originally launched as an online payment option meant to be faster and more enticing for global merchants.
But despite early success as a complement to bitcoin for investors and traders, the project has arguably fallen behind as the blockchain technology underlying bitcoin has increasingly become the focus of institutions and former bitcoin startups.
However, the team behind the project used the announcement to double down on its prior market positioning, introducing a number of updates that sought to showcase it is focused on transaction speed, scaling, merchant support and mobile wallets.
With the project unencumbered by the byzantine nature of bitcoin’s mammoth governance structure, some in the community believe it could come to implement changes quicker than the world’s most popular digital currency, thus giving it a key competitive advantage. Competition emerges
Still, the roadmap release comes at a time that could viewed as a defining moment for litecoin, one that in many ways finds it grappling with changes in how digital currencies are being perceived amid heightened institutional interest.
At a time when many in the industry are eager for technological innovation, litecoin’s success has historically been the strength of its market capitalization, and its perception as a useful hedge for investors who wanted relief from the sometimes more volatile bitcoin network.
For example, litecoin is one of only a handful of digital currency networks to reach a market cap […]
