The first hard fork for Litecoin is already a fact and it’s called Litecoin Cash. It was announced today, early in the morning, and since then, Litecoin is sliding down in value. The digital currency is currently down with 2.5% after the announcement went public.
According to the Litecoin Cash Foundation, each user who holds Litecoin will be entitled to 10 tokens of Litecoin cash for each Litecoin they currently have.
The ultimate reason for the upcoming fork is essentially to make the network faster and the processing of transactions much quicker. Reportedly, the new currency will be more energy intensive, but will provide more safety and proof-of-work mining method.
The fork will occur precisely at block 1371111. The Litecoin network is currently on block 1368028 at the time of writing, according to BlockCypher. The fork is expected to occur sometime around 9 p.m. ET on Monday, February 19, reported Business Insider.
What is interesting here is that the Litecoin development team, and more specifically, Charlie Lee deny that any hard fork will be initiated in the near future and that any such attempt is an actual scam. Lee tweeted:
“The Litecoin team and I are not forking Litecoin. Any forks that you hear about is a scam trying to confuse you to think it’s related to Litecoin. Don’t fall for it and definitely don’t enter your private keys or seed into their website or client! Be careful out there!”
While the developers of Litecoin Cash are truly not related to the original development team of Litecoin, they say that the fork is not a scam and it will happen for the benefit to the whole Litecoin community.