Charlie Lee, Litecoin’s (LTC) creator, declared that he will focus on making the major cryptocurrency more fungible in a tweet Jan. 28.
Lee stated in the tweet that “fungibility is the only property of sound money that is missing from Bitcoin & Litecoin,” adding that “the next battleground will be on fungibility and privacy.”
The tweet’s conclusion is that the developer wants to zero in on implementing private transactions in Litecoin, stating:
“I am now focused on making Litecoin more fungible by adding Confidential Transactions.”
In reply to another tweet in the same thread, Lee explained that confidential transactions could be added to Litecoin through a soft fork. A soft fork is a modification made in a cryptocurrency’s source code that doesn’t lead to the division of blockchain, as happens with a hard fork.
Lee also noted in the same thread that the update would be implemented “sometime in 2019.”
Fungibility is the propriety of money that implies that every unit of a given asset has exactly the same value as any other asset of the same kind and unit. As Cointelegraph previously reported, Bitcoin’s (BTC) fungibility has previously been called into question when particular bitcoins become “tainted” by their involvement in criminal activity, which can decrease their value.
So-called privacy coins, such as Monero (XMR), Zcash (ZEC) and Dash (DASH) were purposefully created to improve on perceived issues with Bitcoin and other altcoins, such as a lack of sufficient anonymity and fungibility.
Litecoin is currently the 7th largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, seeing about 2 percent growth on the day to press time.