On April 5th, 2022, it was announced that LTCLabs, a digital currency laboratory was officially established. Shortly after, ANTPOOL invested its first round of capital into LTC Labs' Gnosis Safe wallet. LTC Labs is managed via a distributed autonomous organization jointly created by ANTPOOL and Litecoin Foundation. Now the organization is actively proposing new ideas and paths forward to support and expand the LTC ecosystem.
As a pioneer in cryptocurrency, Litecoin has a more than ten year history since it was established. It is open-source, decentralized, secure, borderless and of currency consensus, which has been fully affirmed and certified by the market. ANTPOOL, the world's most advanced digital currency mining platform, has always taken it as its mission to lead blockchain technology and to explore the infinite possibilities it has to offer. Together with the Litecoin Foundation to support LTC Labs, ANTPOOL plans to donate 50% of the mining revenue, generated from their Litecoin mining pool, to LTC Labs. The funds will be used to compensate contributors for building a thriving LTC ecosystem, including anonymous transactions, research on digital currencies, wallets and other technologies. ANTPOOL and Litecoin Foundation’s mission is to build LTC Labs into the world's leading digital currency research institute.
LTC Labs is structured as a DAO consisting of ten founding members. Six members are from ANTPOOL and four members are from the Litecoin Foundation. By using Gnosis and Snapshot to control the funds autonomously, each member can create a proposal and vote, with each member holding the same voting rights. Litecoin creator Charlie Lee and ANTPOOL CEO Lei Lv are two of the founding members. The proposals within the organization are voted on by ballot, with a quorum of 5 votes that need a majority to pass. Once a proposal passes, reality.eth crowd-sourced smart control oracle is used to enforce that the funds are sent out correctly to the project that is being funded.
Since the establishment of LTC Labs, the members have been proactive in listening to the opinions of the Litecoin community. One of which has been to solve challenges in the NFT market, primarily high transaction fees and low security. Since the creation of OmniLite, which is a second layer token creation tool built to run in conjunction with the Litecoin network, the community has been creating NFTs via OmniLite. Thus, as demand for an NFT marketplace arose, LiteVerse launched the first Litecoin NFT website platform, and LTC Labs is currently exploring a partnership opportunity with LiteVerse that will help support growth and development of the platform. The goal is to help accelerate development needed and in turn reduce Litecoin users dependence on other platforms by expanding this NFT marketplace. At the same time providing users with easy to use, efficient and low-cost set of NFT blockchain services. In the future, the goal is to open the platform with more solutions from image copyrights to metaverse games.
LTC Labs can create and accelerate value for projects and development ideas by supporting them financially. ANTPOOL hopes and welcomes more PoW development teams to collaborate together and to incubate high-quality blockchain projects, with the aim to continue to develop a solid infrastructure for the PoW community.
In addition to this initiative, LTC Labs will be a sponsor of the 3rd Annual Litecoin Summit in Las Vegas on October 21-22, 2022. (https://www.litecoin.net/summit). LTC Labs continues to support and participate in PoW projects and industry seminars, and is looking to have a greater presence in the future.
