Ever since the creation of bitcoin back in 2008, the financial world has changed its trajectory forever. This new technological advancement has given light to the unbanked population in regions such as Asia, South America, and Africa. As popularity grew, many altcoins have surged and copied the open source code to create a better, faster and decentralized peer to peer transactional cryptocurrency.
Charlie Lee created Litecoin as an alternative to bitcoin which has a faster transaction processing time per block (10 minutes vs 2.5 minutes), more supply, and a different algorithm. Monero and Zcash came up with a more secure cryptocurrency, while Bitcoin Cash, Gold, Diamond, and Private forked bitcoins open source code for different respective reasons and benefits to their community. These are all great advancement, but there is still one problem, how will average tech people adopt it for everyday purchases?
Decentralized micropayments and practical applications have been a vision in the cryptocurrency world as an alternative to the banking system.
The technology and need are there, but adaptability and solving some of cryptocurrencies biggest issues are still years away. Many projects have been looking for solutions to this, Bitcoins lightning network is working towards facilitating micropayments but they still face the same issue as every other cryptocurrency: settling instantly with merchants using fiat currency to avoid high entry barrier and price volatility.
LITEX (currently traded in HADAX) is a completely decentralized payment ecosystem for cryptocurrency. Built on LTXN（LITEX Network), Litex supports instant micropayments with extreme low service charge. With the creation of such decentralized ecosystem, LITEX is not exposed to single point of failure risks. Their nodes can handle millions of payments per second which can meet the requirement of timeliness in every-day payment scenarios.
Delayed of payment and congestion in the bitcoin blockchain has been an obstacle for mass adoption and practical everyday cryptocurrency purchasers. The problem with the lightning network is their requirement to stay online at all times, which makes it vulnerable to hacks. Light nodes, and centralization have been other issues for the lightning network solution.
The Litex team has been in the payment industry for a while and their adaptability for merchants has been very promising, to say the least. Compared to Bitbays centralized business model and Tenx semi centralization, Litex introduces a fully decentralised business model. Their off chain solution will decrease the ability of hackers to steal cryptocurrencies.
Currently, there aren’t so many places where you can make cryptocurrency purchases. Litex foresees a future where you won’t have to sell your cryptocurrency to make everyday micropayment purchases and not have to worry about fees, withdrawal limits, and volatility. The use of smart contracts will facilitate Litex vision. If you are a crypto holder, imagine not having to sell your stake in bitcoin to buy a cup of coffee, because the merchant is able to accept crypto as payment without their knowledge (conversion will be made in the backend).
As of today, Litex is working on the BOLT protocol while designing the system architecture. They plan to launch their app officially by 2019 and start testing their project with merchants as well in small scale. They will launch a large scale project by 2020 for mass adoption of their technology. Led by XU, Guanghong, the Litex team has a vast academic background in cryptography, applied mathematics and blockchain engineering to pursue their ambitious project.
*Disclaimer- if 90% of startups fail, so can cryptocurrency projects. Many current projects like Litex are still testing their solutions but are working hard to launch their products on time. Please do your own research and due diligence before investing in cryptocurrencies.
Originally published at ebitnews.com on May 17, 2018.
https://ebitnews.com/2018/05/17/making-cryptocurrency-micropayments-a-possibility-with-the-litex-network/
