Bitcoin was forked nearly 19 times so far and another 50 more hard forks are expected this year. There were hard forks in other block chain networks (ZCash, for example) as well. However, Litecoin has not undergone any forking so far and this about to change in a week’s time. The Litecoin network is scheduled to undergo a hard fork at block 1371111 or on February 19, whichever is earliest, according to a posting on Bitcointalk and cryptocurrencytalk. The developer behind the project has officially announced the upcoming fork that will create Litecoin Cash (LCC).
Reason for the hard fork of Litecoin network: The developers have cited the lack of fast and cheap SHA 256 coin, with good difficulty adjustment. Further, according to the developer, there is a plenty of hashing power that can be used for mining based on SHA 256 algorithm.
Salient features of Litecoin Cash (LCC): The block time is 2.50 minutes and difficulty will be adjusted at the end of every block (Evan Duffield’s proven DarkGravity V3 algorithm from Dash). Transactions will be cheaper than Litecoin. There will be a maximum supply of 840 million coins. SegWit and Lightning facility will be deployed. The block chain size will be 13 Gb.
Mining: To avoid domination by any particular miner block rewards will start at 1.25 LCC and grow to 250 LCC over the first 400 blocks after the fork. The first 24 blocks after the fork will be mined at minimum difficulty. After this, DarkGravity will adjust the difficulty based on observed block generation time. The 250 LCC block reward (equivalent to 25 LTC) will halve at the same chain heights as Litecoin. The block chain bootstrap will be available for download before the wallet is launched or any mining is done. That will enable everyone to start mining at the same time and prevent unfair advantage to any particular party. Around 1% of the total supply will be premined and pooled into a development fund.
Claim: All holders of Litecoin, at the time of forking, will receive Litecoin Cash on a 1:10 basis (10 Litecoin Cash for every Litecoin held). The Litecoin Cash should be held in a supporting exchange or preferably in a desktop Litecoin wallet such as Litecoin core or Jaxx. The developers also acknowledged that it is not an official Litecoin project. The forked altcoin will have Litecoin in its name to maintain the tradition created by other crypto currency forks.