Litecoin, often heralded as the silver of crypto to Bitcoin’s gold, is making a move to attempt a revival of the blockchain program. Its performance, when compared to other popular blockchain veteran protocols, has been quite underwhelming.
Litecoin announced recently that they would be adding privacy elements to the chain in an effort to appeal to the privacy first community of crypto. The technology is called mimblewimble and it decreases what data can be seen about the transaction to keep it private. Other popular crypto currencies that have the same underlying technology include Zcash and Monero. The lead engineer behind the project, Charlie Lee was quoted saying, “I want to make it so that users don’t have to worry about giving up their financial privacy by using Litecoin even if you’re not doing anything illegal, you don’t want people to know how much money you have or what your paycheck is.”
The future of privacy blockchains, however, is unclear as many regulators have expressed concern over the dangers of illicit and illegal activity becoming rampant. In 2019, Coinbase delisted Zcash in the UK most likely because of regulatory concerns and just after the Litecoin privacy announcement five South Korean exchanges immediately delisted the project. While the initial backlash was expected from countries that are openly against any anonymous chains, litecoin has taken some solid steps forward in reestablishing their dominance as one of the top 10 blockchains.