Litecoin To Soon Take The Privacy Route

Litecoin has been around for quite sometime now and has established itself within the cryptospace as the digital silver while Bitcoin remains the digital gold. For several years now, Litecoin has also drawn the attention of large investors, such that it has consistently maintained a place in the top 15 crypto spot by market capitalization for years now. Presently trading at $50, it managed to reach a peak of $300 in 2017.

In a recent interview with CoinDesk, Charlie Lee, the founder of Litecoin, disclosed that the project is seeking to adopt a more robust privacy features. The new features will make it more difficult to track the transactions of both the sender's and the receiver's addresses on the Litecoin network.

Perhaps due to the success of privacy-oriented cryptocurrencies such as Zcash (ZEC) and Monero (XMR), Lee is seeking to take the privacy route as a way of re-igniting general interest in Litecoin, which has not gained much traction, when compared to other high cap cryptos, in the past months. Lee plans to implement the privacy features to the mainnet in about a year from now.

Unlike Monero which uses a technique called ring signatures to hide sender and receiver data, however, Litecoin will be relying on a technology called mimblewimble to reduce the amount of data that is publicly visible on the Litecoin blockchain. The move has a potential to now make Litecoin more distinct from Bitcoin, as critics often claim that it has maintained the status of Bitcoin wannabe for too long.

If Lee who, in a bid to decentralize Litecoin, sold most part of his stake some years ago, succeeds in integrating privacy into the core of the Litecoin blockchain, we might see a rally in the price of Litecoin in the coming days. This is because privacy-oriented tokens like Monero and Zcash have so far done very well in 2020.

However, an integration of privacy features into the Litecoin network could also make it clash with regulatory authorities who see privacy tokens as willing tools in the hands of criminals and terrorists. The risk becomes even higher following a recent Europol's recent declaration that privacy coins are top threats in the fight against cyber crime.