Litecoin Enthusiasts Can Now Create NFTs, Tokens With OmniLite

As more blockchain projects embrace non-fungible tokens (NFTs), Litecoin is joining the fray with the introduction of OmniLite.

Created as a fork of Bitcoin back in 2011, Litecoin’s token litecoin was once described as “the silver to bitcoin’s gold.” Since then, it has iterated on many of Bitcoin’s technical developments, including the early adoption of Segregated Witness (SegWit) in 2017.

Now, in a move to keep up with the times, it is offering Litecoin users the opportunity to create decentralized tokens and smart contracts, along with NFTs and stablecoins.

Read more: What Are NFTs and How Do They Work?

OmniLite is based on the earlier Omni protocol (originally known as Mastercoin), which acted as a secondary layer on the Bitcoin blockchain. Powered by the OMNI token, Bitcoin users could create custom tokens and early precursors to NFTs.

Tether tokens first launched on Omni in October 2014, and the protocol remained the only one to support tether for over three years until the stablecoin launched as an ERC-20 token on Ethereum in November 2017. In less than two years, however, Ethereum’s share of tether’s total circulating supply eclipsed Omni’s. Since then, Omni’s popularity has steadily declined.

Developed by Omni and Litecoin developer Loshan with assistance from the Omni Foundation, OmniLite is an effort from the Litecoin Foundation to let users to create and manage assets on the Litecoin blockchain.

According to the announcement, “The tokens created via OmniLite can be considered to be an extension of litecoin and as a result, the transactions from these tokens are recorded on its blockchain.”

Just as Omni utilizes the Bitcoin network, OmniLite will use OP_RETURN to record token transactions on the Litecoin blockchain.

Currently, OmniLite supports a wallet mode via Litecoin Omni and is available for Windows, Linux and MacOS. The application programming interface (API) is available here.

At least for the moment, Litecoin isn’t seeing the constant pressure that higher volume blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum experience. Consequently, its transaction speeds are faster, and fees are lower. But should OmniLite grow in popularity, the ability of the blockchain to scale will be key to maintaining these performance metrics.

And since all of OmniLite’s transactions will be recorded on Litecoin, the blockchain would need to address those issues of scalability.

Litecoin Foundation representative Jay Milla said, “Litecoin has the capacity to handle higher transactions per second (tps) at lower fees compared to Bitcoin or Ethereum. So currently we don’t expect any issues. In the meanwhile, there is ongoing research and work going [toward] enabling the assets created on the Omni layer to be transactable on the Lightning Network.”

The Lightning Network is a second-layer payment protocol built on top of the Bitcoin base layer that offers a way to shift transactions off the main chain, thereby offering a scalable, low-cost, nearly instantaneous way to transact with Bitcoin.