LitecoinZ (LTZ)

“LitecoinZ was born as a community project in January 2018 as a code fork from Zcash, but unlike Zcash (and other forks), LitecoinZ has some differences:

• own pszTimestamp
• own pchMessageStart
• own P2P and RPC ports
• own Genesis block
• 84,000,000 as total supply
• 50 coins as block rewards
• rewards halving each 840,000 blocks (~4 years)
• Performance improvements from original Bitcoin source code
• Native Wallet GUI

When Antminer was released, to remain ASIC resistant, LitecoinZ changed its PoW algorithm from Equihash n=200/k=9 to n=144/k=5, ensuring its network decentralization.

But the biggest jump occurred in October 2020, starting from a copy of the original 0.19 Bitcoin source code, LitecoinZ was completely rewritten by porting the original code inherited from Zcash (and changes from LitecoinZ) on it. In this way, now, LitecoinZ is paired with the original Bitcoin Source Code, has all its features (up to Bitcoin version 0.19), and has privacy and anonymity from Zcash. (https://github.com/litecoinz-core/litecoinz)

On this version, Coinbase management has been relaxed, removing the enforcement to shield them to z-addresses before using them, leaving users the choice to perform this operation or to spend directly on them. (https://github.com/litecoinz-core/litecoinz/commit/f7cf601e2eca2cfa245c072cb96a7b43cef7136b)

LitecoinZ has also removed the “deprecation height” inherited from Zcash and present on each fork from it. In this way, mining pools and exchanges have no need to upgrade the LitecoinZ wallet due to the expiration height reached, but only if significant changes have been made to the code, and therefore, an update is needed. (https://github.com/litecoinz-core/litecoinz/commit/245e6583af59f551b7a73daa7ddf6335ecdff547)

LitecoinZ has also removed the “expiration by height” inherited from Zcash and present on each fork from it. In this way, transaction expiration is managed by the original Bitcoin source code that expires never confirmed transactions after 72 hours. (https://github.com/litecoinz-core/litecoinz/commit/33be9d27bc6bff7d5ab1ff81bf71c590540d0632 and https://github.com/litecoinz-core/litecoinz/commit/a607d32f113969eac226f33c3266d52970e7364e)

LitecoinZ has successfully passed its first two soft forks, activating CSV at a height of 585,000 and Segwit at a height of 590,000.

At height 600,000, LitecoinZ has also passed its 3rd soft fork switching difficulty adjustment algorithm from Digishield to Lwma and block time from ~150 seconds to ~600. (See https://github.com/zawy12/difficulty-algorithms/issues/3 and https://github.com/zawy12/difficulty-algorithms/issues/1 for details about Lwma)”