How Litecoin's Virtual Machine Brings Smart Contracts, DeFi and AI to LTC

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]Well, I think we're here for the Cypherpunk mission, hard money, privacy, you know, laying out code, solving decentralized problems. We're here for the freedom, community. He is the visionary unlocking a massive utility for Litecoin, transforming it from a stagnant asset you just hold into a productive engine for yield from real-world assets to the unified world ledger. He is building the future of freedom money. This is Aztec and this is Foundations by Litecoin.

[00:00:31]Hey everybody, welcome back to Foundations by Litecoin, where we're interviewing the people laying out the foundation for the Litecoin ecosystem.

[00:00:40]I'm your host Randy Hipper and before we get into our guest, I'm going to kindly ask you to smash a like, subscribe to our channel, and share this out with friends. As you guys have seen, Lit VM has taken over the space as it's lit. It has everyone on a fire. And today I have Aztec from Lit VM to break it all down for us. Welcome to the show.

[00:00:58]Thank you so much, Randy. It's really great to be here. You're a legend in the space.

[00:01:04]Can't wait to chop it up with you.

[00:01:05]You're flattering me. He's already on the right track, guys. And so today we're going to talk about Lit VM, but before we get to Lit VM, Aztec, I just want to break down, how did you find Litecoin in crypto? What was your journey and why do you feel like Litecoin is the right coin to be building this type of project on?

[00:01:21]Litecoin was the first coin I ever purchased way back in 2016.

[00:01:26]And I found my way back to Litecoin.

[00:01:29]Essentially, started contributing to many projects early on, helped kick off DeFi summer back in 2020, incubated Polygon, QuickSwap, a bunch of other projects in different ecosystems. And essentially, saw all the awesome innovations in the space like interoperability and NFTs and then more recently a lot of the Bitcoin technology. And once we started seeing that the innovations in the UTXO side of things was maturing, I thought, well, why not do this for Litecoin? So, it didn't exactly start that fast. I did a lot of research, looked at a lot of the other legacy assets, and essentially kept coming back to Litecoin as the strongest legacy asset with growth, trust, and innovation. And, you know, with all that research, decided to go ahead and build something for Litecoin, seeing that there isn't anything in the space that really marries that Cypherpunk mission with all the innovation that's here today, and fully unlocking, you know, this new utility for Litecoin. Absolutely. And, I always say to people, I'm here for the fundamentals, not the pumpamentals. And, it seems like you're more of a fundamentalist when it comes to Litecoin. And, you said that it kind of like brings you back to the truth of what the space is. And, at the core, what do you think the truth is of the space? Like, what are we really here for? And, how does this tie into your research that you did to give you that conclusion that Litecoin was one of the things that you really liked in the space? Well, I think we're here for the Cypherpunk mission, you know, hard money, privacy, you know, laying out code, solving decentralized problems. We're here for the freedom community. What brings me to Litecoin is just that, most fundamentally strong crypto legacy asset, that freedom money. And, if you look at the other legacy assets, they cannot compare with Litecoin, the growth, the trust, the innovation. Even if you look at the Bitcoin community, for instance, and the tech there, for me, what I see is like kind of a a hard line between ossifies and people that don't want, you know, any kind of innovation. And, on the other side, you have Litecoin where, you know, much of the innovation on Litecoin was adopted by Bitcoin at different stages. And, it's continued to innovate with Mimblewimble extension block technology, which is basically just optional privacy, which Bitcoin doesn't natively have.

[00:03:57]And the whole community around Litecoin is very open to innovation. So, essentially, that's why I always say, you know, Litecoin is the perfect legacy asset ready for innovation. It's the hardest freedom money legacy asset ready for innovation. Absolutely.

[00:04:15][clears throat] I 100% agree with you.

[00:04:17]And like you've said, Litecoin has continuously kept building, especially Charlie Lee, just really trying to work on the code along with all the other developers that have been sourced out throughout the years. And Mimble Wimble extension blocks, I think, is just a revolution technology. The fungibility and the privacy, I think, is essential to sound money. But a lot of the things that people were saying about Litecoin is, "Oh, but where's DeFi?" And I feel like what you're doing at Lit VM has really opened the doors. And so, people may have may have heard of EVMs, like Ethereum virtual machines. But what is a virtual machine, and why did you try to bring that over to Litecoin instead of just letting it live on ETH and anywhere else?

[00:04:56]So, when you look at the space holistically, what what I see is that ETH is the place for smart contracts.

[00:05:03]And of course, a lot of people will argue with this and say, "Well, it's Solana or some other alt VM." But the thing is is that if you look at ETH holistically between, you know, all of its layer twos and all of the innovation, this is really where the unified world ledger is happening, where all the interoperability and most of the innovation, most of the TVL, most of the institutional interest, it's on ETH. So, basically, what we did is we said, "Okay, well, how can we unlock this massive utility for Litecoin in the best way?"

[00:05:36]And just to try to break it down as easy as possible, EVM land or Ethereum land is essentially where I think the unified world ledger and all that innovation is.

[00:05:46]So, we essentially married that hard money with the best technology and where most of the builders are. So, instead of starting from scratch, essentially like a lot of these layer ones, layer twos, whatever, basically platforms, they're starting totally from scratch. They either have their own language, they have to build their builder groups from scratch and entice people to build with a new language and on a new platform and a new community. But here we're joining two of the most powerful communities, which is Ethereum and Litecoin, in the best, you know, building community all together in one place. That's essentially why we started with Ethereum. And when you decided to bring this to Litecoin, what was your exact vision? Like where did you think this was all going? Do you want RWAs to live on Litecoin? Do you think we're going to full-on do DeFi on Litecoin through Lit VM?

[00:06:44]Definitely. So, we looked at all of the categories because there's so many different things that you can build, you know, around an economy and ecosystem for an asset. And the things that we see as probably the most future-proofed are DeFi yield type opportunities, real-world assets. You have guys like Larry Fink who are saying we're going to tokenize everything. When we talk to the institutions, they really do want to tokenize everything. But we think that that should be paired or backed by Litecoin, hard money essentially. And then the agentic world, which is becoming so massive and taking over much of, you know, all of the technical cities around the world, is also part of our mission here. So, essentially Litecoiners will be able to bring their Litecoin trustlessly into Ethereum land and interact with DeFi, real-world assets, and the agentic side of things.

[00:07:39]Technically, the builders can build other things outside of that, but that's our focus here because we're a specialized chain. And so, when people first hear about Lit VM, they see a word or phrase that might confuse them, which is zk rollups. What is zk rollup? What does that mean for someone that may never have heard of it before? And how do you apply that technology to Litecoin?

[00:08:03]That's one of the secret sauce in our modular build here, you know, so our build has a bunch of pieces and we're taking the best of Ethereum, zk, Litecoin, the hardest money, you know, ready for innovation. We're we're mashing it all up into one build.

[00:08:22]Now, what zk does in this case is that it makes it where someone can have their Litecoin and trustlessly use it in Ethereum land, meaning they don't need to trust a centralized party or a person. They just trust code.

[00:08:40]Mhm.

[00:08:42]>> zk's really just cryptography and this magical internet code that enables someone to prove, "Hey, I have Litecoin on the layer one and I can use it on the layer two."

[00:08:57]And so, it instead of needing to take that Litecoin and trust some, well, let's say a centralized exchange and lock it up in a vault and then get some type of one-to-one tokenized asset, you know, you are able to use your Litecoin, prove that you own it, and use it in Ethereum land without trusting any people. Would you say it's an autonomous checks and balances type of mechanism? Would you argue that's fair or am I completely off base with that? I think that's probably a good way to say it, yeah. It is autonomous in a way that it all works by itself and seamlessly. And so, when you first go to check out LitVM, what is the process of getting involved here?

[00:09:40]Because we have the whole idea of the technology, which is providing DeFi for Litecoin and tying in ETH, and essentially the foundation of the crypto ecosystem. I would say the foundation of our ecosystem is Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum. And so, we hear about this tech, how do we go and apply it? How can we play around?

[00:09:56]Depending on when this actually airs, of course, we might be in a different stage, but technically right now, just yesterday we launched the testnet. Mhm.

[00:10:06]Um and that means that anyone can go ahead and start playing with our tech.

[00:10:11]We really didn't want to release it. We were trying to be perfectionists, [clears throat] but the thing is is we realized we just have to release it into the wild. So, now, you know, people can go ahead and add the testnet to their wallets, start playing with the dapps that are already deployed to LitVM. They can build their own dapps. We hope to have workshops where we learn more about the wallets and build using vibe coding with the community. Essentially, that's a good place to start if you're looking for LitVM, but in my opinion, the best place to start is go learn about Litecoin.

[00:10:44]Start with Litecoin, go play on layer one, send some Litecoin and figure out how easy it is to send Litecoin from one person to another, go pay for something, find some of the artisans in the Litecoin community, buy some cool merch with Litecoin, do something there first, learn about MWEB, and then move to LitVM. Because at that point, it gets a little bit more steeper of a learning curve. You have to learn web3 wallets, smart contracts, what to look out for, what you don't want to touch with what's okay to, you know, trust in web3, etc. So, I'd say start at the basics and work your way up to LitVM. So, what are some dapps? So, let's say I want to go play a game or something. Are there games on LitVM? Are there going to be games in the future? How can I go ahead and actually like play with a dapp? Do I have to have a wallet that enables Lit VM to go and do that or can I download a node? How exactly does that work?

[00:11:39]Sure. So, as of right now, everything's in the testnet environment. So, a lot of the applications there are in the DeFi side and AI side. Over time, we'll have more dapps deployed to this testnet, but those main categories are going to be yield products, so DeFi stuff, real-world assets, so think, you know, you might have indexes or ETFs on chain or be able to trade some type of commodities.

[00:12:06]Like a lot of people are into gold and silver right now or trading oil, oil, you know, those kind of things in the real-world assets side of the category.

[00:12:13]And then, lastly, all the AI stuff. The AI stuff really just makes everything easier. It makes DeFi easier. You know, you can just kind of chat prompt, "Hey, want to do this DeFi trade." But it or build this application. But AI essentially just simplifies everything. So, those are the main things that you'll see today on the testnet, and you can play with those applications. But everything's in a testnet environment, so you're not using real assets, real money. You're using the testnet tokens and the test applications or you're building your own application. That's pretty much what you're going to see today. There's no games. However, there is someone in the Litecoin community that has a trading card game. So, I'll actually I'll just shout him out, Bits.

[00:12:56]He has mentioned that >> Yes.

[00:12:59]>> him. He's on the Litecoin Foundation.

[00:13:01]And he has these trading cards.

[00:13:02]Essentially, he wants to bring them to Lit VM, and then there will be like a trading card game that you'll be able to play on Lit VM. There will be games in the future, but overall, like what those wallets and things that you'll need are really all just the the Web3 wallets.

[00:13:17]So, that could look like a MetaMask wallet, for example. And then, you can add the testnet, play with all the testnet stuff. In the future, when we're at mainnet, if we don't solve some of the UX problems, which I hope to solve, you'll need two different wallets. A Litecoin wallet to send your funds through the ZK side of things, and then you'll need a web 3 wallet that will hold your your assets. But, what we hope to do is have kind of like this Litecoin super app wallet where you have everything at the L1 and can easily interact with all the D5 stuff, white-listed applications in that app, and then also interact with the layer 2 all in one wallet, just making it much more easier.

[00:14:03]Yeah, I would say we're pretty much, you know, at the experimentation level of Lit VM, kind of figuring out what it is, what the initial mission is, and what the liquidity is really going to flow to, whether that is like actual money liquidity or like fault liquidity as to like what people are really attracted to. So, I really respect that. And what a lot of people don't know is that you teamed up with other people like Bitcoin OS, and I believe Arbitrum. Am I correct on that? And so, what is that partnership exactly? Why did you choose to tie in other communities instead of saying, "I'm just a Lightcoiner, and I'm just going to rip apart everyone else."

[00:14:35]Like, why choose to collab with everyone? Which I think is a great thing. I I love it.

[00:14:40]Yeah, we're definitely collaborative people, and we think that, you know, if you want to build the best tech in the world and get the most adoption, you have to work where, you know, the best builders in the space, and you need to go where the builders already are. So, that's in Ethereum land. And we're marrying, you know, Litecoin and Ethereum, so these massive communities.

[00:15:00]Now, really from like a partnership standpoint, Bitcoin OS is a phenomenal team. They are pioneers on the Bitcoin ZK side of things. So, they've been building for 10 plus years. Yeah. And they're awesome. I actually just got off a call with, you know, the technical team there. But, essentially, they're modifying that Bitcoin ZK technology for Litecoin because there's a lot of similarities between Bitcoin and Litecoin.

[00:15:26]And is that what made it [clears throat] easier for you to build here is because they're so similar?

[00:15:31]It made it easier because a lot of the innovation that's happened in the Bitcoin side of things is now something that we can modify for Litecoin in this case which is kind of funny because it's usually gone more Litecoin to Bitcoin but in this case, you know, over the last couple years with like runes, ordinals, and just a lot of uh Yes, the inscriptions.

[00:15:50]>> teams.

[00:15:51]Yes, and a lot of teams trying to solve problems for Bitcoin. Now we're taking some of those things and modifying it for Litecoin. But also with Arbitrum, like on Ethereum land side of things, we're working with the most future-proof blue chip projects like Arbitrum. We're using a piece of their technology for our stack which is Arbitrum Nitro stack.

[00:16:12]And we're also working with Espresso.

[00:16:15]And all that really means is that we're working with the best teams on Ethereum side. So you'll have the most performant chain, fast finality, and then the goal is, especially with Espresso, is to decentralize the sequencer with the roll-up side of things. And And all that means is really just that instead of the Ethereum roll-up or Ethereum land technology being kind of more trust-minimized, they'll be more decentralized. So now you have uh the Ethereum side all cutting-edge and more decentralized. That is so interesting because, you know, my biggest thing with a lot of some DeFi products is that they're not truly decentralized and you could always just trace it back to one group that can have massive control over something. And what I love about Lit VM is it kind of opens that door, again, goes back to the fundamentals of that Cypherpunk movement which is just having a decentralized financial ecosystem. And I feel like this is really the fundamental of that.

[00:17:14]And so yesterday I was seeing videos circulating everywhere related to Lit VM and something called Delight Forge. What is Light Forge? What's happening there?

[00:17:24]I saw this crazy animated video. I was like, wait, what's happening? Yeah, much love to our team. All the partners that we're working with. But Light Forge is essentially the name of our testnet. So, Light Forge is the place where you can go and, you know, forge new applications on the testnet. I love our team. The the animation there was epic. We usually post a lot of really epic animations and we like to have fun. So, that that's probably what you saw there. And yeah, thanks to everyone that's been supporting us. A lot of love. I think when you marry the Litecoiners with Ethereumers, the Ethereum people, you know, you you have this really massive supportive community that truly understands the Cypherpunk mission and what we're really here to do. Exactly.

[00:18:09]And I'm just loving that you've always gone back to the fundamentals of the space and you like to have fun. You're even wearing Lester, which I love Lester. If you guys don't know who Lester is, he is the Litecoin mascot.

[00:18:21]Literally Litecoin logo with a few eyeball emojis and he's a stick figure.

[00:18:25]And I heard he's low-key jacked. You know, like if people don't know. Like apparently he's got a beach bod. So, I absolutely love it. And so, hopefully we can get Lester all over Lit VM. And I'm so excited for the future of it because it just genuinely reignites a fire for me because, you know, back in 2020 and you even were referencing uh that era before where everyone was just coming out with something different and it was like those grocery store tokens where it was like donut and pickle and all these sorts of things and it kind of gave us the basis of like, oh, this is like DeFi. You know, we have some DEXes going on there. Do you think we're going to have Litecoin DEXes?

[00:19:01]Yes, 100%.

[00:19:02]>> Oh, yeah! I'm so excited!

[00:19:06]Yeah, we actually have some institutions that will probably co-incubate the lending market, the DEX all on Lit VM. So, I'm really looking forward I this is some alpha Randy. So, uh we haven't even mentioned this, but this is this will come in the future and there'll be whole new DeFi strategies because right now Litecoin as an asset, you know, it's a cryptocurrency, you can send it, you can receive it, has optional privacy, but there's no programmability. So, from a yield perspective, there's really no real yield unless you take uh Coinbase's CBLTC Mhm. and you play on base, but really they haven't cultivated the ecosystem around this kind of one-to-one Litecoin asset ERC-20 uh derivative. So, what will change is that when you have a Litecoin specialized layer two is that you'll be able to build custom strategies with this new programmability and we hope to tie in a whole new yield ecosystem to the asset. So, this is going to be really special.

[00:20:10]You know, Litecoiners it's sort of just hoddling, which is so important. I love hoddling, but now you'll be able to hoddle and get a yield. Woah!

[00:20:20]Dude, my mind is blown. Ashtag is blowing my mind, guys. I am like wowed right now. So, okay, we're going to have DEXes on Litecoin and I know you mentioned institutions want to incubate that and a lot of people have been, you know, why isn't Litecoin having ETFs all over the place, which I would argue like why like I I would like to battle that as well. Like why institutions are battling Litecoin, but I think it's because they're actually gearing up for this. Would you argue maybe that could be somewhat true?

[00:20:47]I think so. You know, this is a massive utility unlock. So, what institutions currently see is they kind of start with Bitcoin and what they are realizing is that there are other assets that have truly been proven like Litecoin that have all this growth, trust, and innovation and they're truly a blue chip asset that they can go and also stack, but it's also a better opportunity because it's a a little bit higher up the risk curve, but it's also, you know, trustworthy. So, you know, they know that they can make more returns, but as they kind of look at other legacy assets or blue-chip trusted assets, they're looking for other opportunities.

[00:21:30]So, you see like Tom Lee, he's talking about Ethereum, and you've seen a lot of the digital asset treasuries that are starting to stack Ethereum. Well, what they love about Ethereum is that they can get a yield on Ethereum. They can stake it, and they call it digital oil.

[00:21:45]Well, now you have Litecoin, which has all the hard money properties of Bitcoin, but it can also be productive in the sense kind of like how Ethereum is digital oil, Litecoin is digital silver. And if you look at even silver as a commodity, you know, silver is used in many different things. And so, what our goals when you add programmability to Litecoin, now you'll be able to use Litecoin in many different ways. Charlie says, you know, Litecoin is is useful.

[00:22:13]We're going to make it even more useful.

[00:22:15]What we are talking to institutions about and getting them excited about is that now, you know, they have the hard money, and they have more use cases for Litecoin. They'll also be able to get a yield. So, yeah, I think that when we uh do this kind of utility unlock, a lot more institutions will clamor to start stacking Litecoin. I absolutely love it.

[00:22:36]This really lights a fire under the Litecoin community, and I hope people are looking into Lit VM. How can we learn more about Lit VM? If people want to go learn more or come visit your websites or socials, where can we find you guys?

[00:22:48]We're on X. That's where we're like home base is. We have a lot of content there, and the community gets together on X, but we also have a Telegram. The place to kind of find all the leaks is probably on X. Uh you can find us uh by searching Lit VM. But, also we do have a website, so litvm.com, and that's where we have our testnet and our ecosystem page and all of our research papers.

[00:23:12]Actually, I have a ton of research on Litecoin. It's not like we just winged this. We, you know, I would hope not.

[00:23:18]>> [laughter] >> Yeah. So, you got you got all kinds of resources on the page as well. So, litvm.com. That's absolutely amazing.

[00:23:26]And is there anything we did not cover about Lit VM that you want the public to know? I think this was a really great start, and I really appreciate you, Randy. You know, really, at the end of the day, if we want to take our industry to the next level, we have to stop focusing on a lot of the extractive things, I guess, degenerate kind of things, and we have to get a lot more serious, and it is technically already happening, but the way we can do that is focus on hard money, and in this case, especially with technology, with the way that it's maturing, we no longer have to only look at hard money as like an asset that you hoddle. You know, now we can actually use those assets and do things that are productive with them.

[00:24:13]So, if we want to make a good name for our space, let's start with hard money, and let's focus on, you know, really serious innovations that actually provide opportunity for the freedom community, the decentralized freedom community. All I can encourage people to do it as a entire space and as a community, as an industry, is let's uh come back to founding principles. Let's make Satoshi proud. Let's make Charlie Lee proud.

[00:24:38]And let's do real things. Help the world. Change the world. Let's like actually build this unified world ledger and do something positive. Amen to that.

[00:24:48]Let's change the world. Fundamentals over pumpamentals every day of the week.

[00:24:52]Thank you so much, Asatek, for joining us. Guys, check out litvm.com today, and thank you for joining Foundations by Litecoin. Again, I'm your host Randy Hilper. Please make sure you smash the like, comment your thoughts down below, share this out with friends, and I will see you guys next time. Thank you. Bye.