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After languishing for years, the price of a single litecoin has shot higher in recent weeks as its users have thrown support behind a software update that would improve the networks ability to quickly and efficiently process transactions.

On Wednesday, support for a software upgrade called segregated witnessor segwit, for shortwas quickly approaching the 75% threshold of processing power needed for it to take effect.

Those who are unfamiliar with the world of digital currencies may not understand the true significance of this accomplishment. Both bitcoin and ethereum have struggled to achieve the consensus needed to implement important software updates. In ethereums case, the struggle led the network to split into two separate coins. And bitcoin nearly experienced the same fate last month.

[Litecoin] has done what bitcoin hasnt; it has managed to break through an impasse by offering a scaling solution, said Charles Hayter, founder and chief executive officer of CryptoCompare, a site that provides data and analytics about cryptocurrencies.

Investors were paying as much as $12 per litecoin on Wednesday, an increase of more than 20% from the prior day, according to data from CryptoCompare. That is just shy of a more than three-year high reached last week. The bitcoin price BTCUSD, -0.88% on the other hand, was flat at $1,200 a coin.

SegWit would effectively strip out some data from each litecoin transaction, allowing miners to squeeze more of them into each block on the litecoin blockchain. It would also make it easier for buyers to transfer litecoin to one another using so-called off chain transactions. These transactions arent processed by the primary litecoin network, and therefore dont require fees to be paid to the litecoin miners who power it.

A blockchain is the distributed, cryptographically secured ledger that powers digital currencies like bitcoin. Every computer running the litecoin software maintains a record of every litecoin transaction, and each transaction must first be validated by each node in the network before it is confirmed.

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This digital currency is about to succeed where bitcoin has failed - MarketWatch