LTC Recovers as Litecoin Smart Contracts Set to Go Live

Litecoin rallied significantly in mid-February this year due to an announcement that the platform's merchant payment processing system would go live on the 26th of the same month.

The Litepay delay saw LTC drop in value from over $180 down to almost $110 over the course of March, but recent news has seen the token halt its rapid descent, recovering to the $129 level based on positive market sentiment caused by the announcement of a partnership between Aliant Payment Systems and Litecoin.

"The Litecoin Foundation is pleased to partner with Aliant Payment Systems for Litecoin payment processing. Aliant offers a well-rounded solution for merchants to accept Litecoin easily with physical point of sales terminal, virtual sales terminal, and custom API integration. Merchants also have the flexibility to keep the payments they receive in LTC or convert them immediately into fiat currency."

The most interesting element of this partnership is that Charlie Lee has referenced smart contracts on the Litecoin network as part of the announcement.

The Litecoin development team hasn't made any significant statements regarding smart contract implementation on the Litecoin network since a mid-2017 tweet from Lee referencing the possibility of smart contracts facilitated by RSK's two-way peg solution, so the announcement of Litecoin smart contracts has many crypto community members scratching their heads.

"We went with Litecoin as the second asset class, after bitcoin, for our smart contract investing solution for 3 primary reasons: 1. commitment to bitcoin compatibility: core roadmap, p2sh support, lightning support, etc; 2. slightly better scalability than bitcoin in short term; 3. mining fees."

The smart contracts referenced by both Charlie Lee and Bill Barhydt are dissimilar to smart contracts in the Ethereum sense.

Abra uses a multi-sig smart contract-based investment system that allows the platform to create synthetic digital assets based on either Bitcoin or Litecoin.

Abra smart contracts are based on P2SH scripts, and simulate investment contracts in the same way a gold ETF is a contract based on USD. In the case of a gold ETF, if the value of gold goes up, the user gains more USD - or if it goes down, loses USD. Abra smart contracts work the same way, but use Bitcoin or Litecoin instead of USD, with Abra itself acting as the counterparty.

With smart contracts set to launch on the Litecoin blockchain on the 13th of this month, Litecoin is set to experience a strong resurgence as one of the most valuable tokens by market cap.