With so many different altcoins available these days, most people won’t even remember Feathercoin. Although this cryptocurrency has a bit of a checkered history, one of its lead developers has announced he will make a return in 2018. In addition, he has unveiled some interesting plans for this currency, which will celebrate its fifth birthday next year.

What’s Next for Feathercoin?

For those people who have been involved with cryptocurrency for more than five years, the name Feathercoin will ring a bell. This coin was created back in the day when the number of altcoins could be counted on one’s fingers and toes. It was also the era in which Namecoin and Peercoin were still talked about regularly, something that is not the case now. Feathercoin was just one of the few altcoins which existed back then, even though it triggered a domino effect.

More specifically, Feathercoin was one of the first Litecoins to garner great support, and it was the beginning of the Influx of Litecoin Clones. Although Feathercoin borrowed a lot of traits from Litecoin, it was not a copycat project by any means. Instead, it was a Litecoin hard fork, developed by Bushstar and a few other people. Feathercoin’s start as a hard fork came after trying to use it as a separate currency first, but the failure to create a genesis block prevented that from happening.

Once the launch actually happened, the mining difficulty was so low that an insta-mine occurred almost immediately. Close to 6 million coins were mined within the first three weeks, which remains controversial to this day. Later on, the currency was added to BTC-E, although that development is still subject to a lot of speculation as well. Despite those issues, Feathercoin survived, yet it was seemingly semi-abandoned some time ago.

Big was everyone’s surprise when Bushstar suddenly announced his return to the Feathercoin development scene in 2018. Although people knew he was still around, no one had any high hopes for Feathercoin until this week. Although it remains to be seen what Peter Bushnell can bring to the table in this regard, rest assured there are a lot of people out there who have held an FTC balance to this very day.

According to the tweet above, Bushnell has some big plans for this altcoin. More specifically, he is looking to integrate Lightning Network functionality at some point. That is pretty interesting, although the updated Feathercoin will be based on Litecoin’s 0.13 codebase, by the look of things. This would mean Feathercoin would also receive native SegWit support in the next few months, which will yield some interesting results.

Additionally, Bushstar says he wants to make Feathercoin compatible with BarterDEX. As most people should know by now, atomic swaps are a big part of the cryptocurrency ecosystem right now. Litecoin is a currency often involved with such swaps; thus, it makes a lot of sense to bring similar functionality to Feathercoin. How all this will play out in the coming months remains to be determined, though. It will be pretty interesting to see this coin rise from the ashes; that’s for sure.