Charlie Lee announces move to improve Litecoin's privacy

Charlie Lee, creator of Litecoin, announced in a tweet earlier this morning the intention to pursue confidential transactions in a future release of the implementation sometime in 2019. Plans are for the release to be implemented via a soft-fork, and will initially offer users optionality in shielding transaction amounts, a move to reach easier consensus on the change, according to Lee's Twitter thread.

Confidential transactions is a form of privacy that obfuscates transaction amounts over the network, rather than the addresses the coins are being sent to. The move comes at a time when many in the Bitcoin community are exploring ways to improve its privacy feature set, and could reopen dialogue of litecoin's ability to provide a "testing ground" for Bitcoin at large — in this case a stress test on the benefits and trade-offs of implementing confidential transactions.