Private transactions are coming to Litecoin but need extra funding

By Darryn Pollock

The Litecoin foundation is looking to step up development of private transactions on the Litecoin network. To do so, it has posted a Litecoin wallet address for donations specifically to this cause. So far, the address has received 2.5 litecoin, worth $240.

Normal cryptocurrency transactions involve making the transaction data publicly available. This has the downside that blockchain analytics providers can build up profiles of who is sending how much money to whom. Currently, crypto transactions are far less private that the current banking system—let alone cash payments. In contrast, private transactions use cryptography to hide the transaction data, enabling people to keep their financial transaction history private.

Some blockchains already offer this ability including Monero, which makes transactions really difficult to follow along the blockchain, and Zcash, which uses such cryptography to fully hide transaction data—although few people use its privacy preserving features.

However, paying people to research and code private transactions is expensive since the cryptography is so complex few people can get their head around it—let alone program it. And with the Litecoin Foundation spending its money on promotional deals with the UFC, it needs further funding to build out features for the network itself.

It will also focus on developing the Lightning network, a second-layer scaling solution built on top of the Bitcoin network. Additionally, funds will go towards building standalone Litecoin wallet LoafWallet.

In the past two months alone, the coin has been added to Binance’s Singaporean exchange, and been accepted for buying flights and hotels through a collaboration with TravelbyBit. But now it’s time for the hard graft to begin.

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