Cardano and Litecoin discuss the velvet fork to achieve interoperability

• The eventual introduction of a velvet fork could create a bridge between the Cardano (ADA) and Litecoin (LTC) blockchain.
• In conjunction with the NiPoPoWs, the Litecoin update would allow the voluntary participation of miners with the Cardano network.

Following the bullish sentiment in the market, Litecoin and Cardano had a week of significant gains. At the time of publication, ADA and LTC hit their annual highs of $ 0.16 and $ 89.52, respectively. In the introduction to the Litening webinar series, Litecoin Foundation Director David Schwartz talked about a project with great potential to further raise the price of cryptocurrencies.

The project is the construction of a “bridge” between the Litecoin and Cardano blockchains. In mid-July, Cardano inventor Charles Hoskinson reached out to Litecoin inventor Charlie Lee with the proposal. In a subsequent publication, Schwartz explained that communication between networks could be implemented with a velvet fork. In this way, you can make changes to the base code without requiring the consent of the majority.

This method, according to the director of the Litecoin Foundation, would be applied in conjunction with a non-interactive NiPoPoWs or Proof-of-Work. Therefore, Litecoin network participants can voluntarily choose whether to adopt the changes introduced in the velvet fork. Blocks validated with this update have “backward compatibility” and work flawlessly with blocks that work without the update. The director of the Litecoin Foundation added:

It will allow clients that upgrade to the new rules to still be compatible with those that don’t and add no changes to the rules at the consent level. In other words, Pool A decides to use the velvet fork which allows for cross-chain communications, etc., but Pool B doesn’t. It won’t affect any of the pools and they can still accept each other’s blocks.

Decision of the Cardano and Litecoin community

Dionysis Zindros, a blockchain researcher from the University of Athens, also attended the webinar. Together with Schwartz, Zindros explained that implementing a velvet fork and NiPoPoW presents few technical difficulties. At the academic institute Zindros belongs, they have already successfully implemented a velvet fork in a Bitcoin Cash test network.

Therefore, webinar attendees agreed that the biggest challenge is getting community approval. However, the researcher and director of the Litecoin Foundation were optimistic about the acceptance that an initiative like the proposal will have in communities.

Cardano is developing the components of the Goguen era. In the most recent updates, the multiple teams working on Cardano development have presented progress in implementing new features such as financial contracts, smart contracts, support for multiple tokens, decentralized governance, among others. IOHK will soon begin with the first phase of implementation on the Cardano mainnet. A bridge with the Litecoin blockchain could benefit both communities and increase the value of the assets operating in the networks.