Litecoin Core, the most popular full node implementation of Litecoin is getting closer to its next major release. The Litecoin projects lead developer, Adrian Gallagher hinted at the next update with screenshots posted to his twitter account stating:

Litecoin Core 0.18.1 coming together nicely!

Core currently accounts for just over 90% of the entire network according to data provided from Blockchair, with the latest build 0.17.1 making up around 50%. It also appears that just over half of the network is ran from the US, Germany and France although this does not account for all available connections or TOR enabled nodes where these countries are popular exit points.

The ‘Litecoin Project’ keep updates closely aligned with the ‘Bitcoin Core project’ and typically lag a few releases behind at any one time, as such this next update will consist of 0.18 and 0.18.1 improvements. This release will introduce numerous new features, bug fixes and performance improvements, as well as updated translations.

Among the changes are refinements to block and transaction handling, the network code and P2P protocol, GUI, wallet and build system along with the typical plethora of new RPC’s and depreciation of many others. Over 100 changes have made their way into this major release which has been much anticipated for some time, although no exact release date has yet been given from the team. The latest update we have from Gallagher states that ‘It’s pretty much all done except for a fee related issue’.

Core is the backbone of the network that allows businesses to fetch and handle data as well as day to day operations. Updates like these are vital to the health and advancement of the network and users who choose to run a full node help signal their vote in the direction of the project by verifying their own instance of the blockchain and setting the rules. The latest Core release is available to download via Litecoin.com.