We plan to release Litecoin Core 0.13rc in about one week. After that, we will further test it for one or two weeks and then release the final version.
We are going to include quite many features in this release as mentioned in the Litecoin Core roadmap https://litecoincore.org/.
Beside that, we will have the following changes.
Litecoin Core 0.13 will not use BIP9 for SegWit. BIP9 breaks merge mining of altcoins like dogecoin and requires those altcoins to hard fork to be mergemined with Litecoin again. We choose not to use BIP9 for SegWit because we believe other altcoins are also part of the cryptocurrency ecosystem and breaking them is not consistent with our moral values. Instead, we will use the traditional IsSuperMajority method to activate and enforce SegWit, i.e. once 75% consensus of miners is reached, SegWit gets activated but is optional, and if 95% consensus is reached, SegWit will be required.
The current multisig addresses have a prefix “3”, which can sometimes be confused with Bitcoin’s multisig addresses. To solve this issue, we will support a new prefix “M”, while the prefix “3” will still be supported to ensure absolute backward compatibility.
The replace by fee (RBF) feature will not be enabled for Litecoin at this moment for the reason that the Litecoin network is still very efficient. We may enable it a bit later.
The network wide Alert system will be retired.
(Just crossposting Xinxi’s reddit post. -Pablocality)