With CTV, Litecoin Looks to be the Testbed for Bitcoin Once Again

On June 10, Charlie Lee shared that Litecoin developers are exploring the possibility of adding CheckTemplateVerify (CTV) as a soft fork in Litecoin Core 0.20.

What is CheckTemplateVerify?

CTV is a soft-fork that Jeremy Rubin, a Bitcoin Core contributor, has been developing for Bitcoin. It proposes a new op_code (OP_CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY) which enables a limited set of highly valuable use cases without significant risk. According to utxos.org, a couple of use cases of CTV include creating smarter custody solutions and supercharging Lightning channels by routing limitless HTLC’s without interactive setups.

Although the idea of adding restrictions to how a transaction can be spent has been around for years through the idea of Covenants, one of the reservations about implementing this technology was its complexity. The proposal Jeremy offers is a much simpler, yet still powerful implementation for expanding smart contract capabilities onto Bitcoin.

However, implementing a new technology onto Bitcoin is not an easy task. Since the beginning of 2020, Jeremy has been looking to build consensus around this proposal. He’s hosted seminars in San Francisco, has gone on several podcasts, and has even hosted an AMA on r/bitcoin. Another way Jeremy hopes to prove the value of CTV is to potentially add it onto Litecoin.

Why? Because Litecoin has served this role before.

Litecoin Looks to Serve as a Testbed for Bitcoin Once Again

Back in 2017, certain Bitcoin developers were having difficulty building consensus around a new technology called Segregated Witness (SegWit). During that time, there were several rumors being spread around about its security. Therefore, the Litecoin community decided to step up and added SegWit before Bitcoin to dispel these rumors. An anonymous individual even locked up $1 MM of Litecoin into a SegWit address as a challenge for anyone to steal it, which no one did.

This definitively proved that Segwit was safe and Bitcoin quickly adopted SegWit soon after.

By adding CTV onto Litecoin, Jeremy is hoping something similar will happen. By proving that CTV is safe to implement and by building demo applications on top of it, he is betting enough interest and consensus can be built around his proposal for Bitcoin.