Any Date For Litecoin Smart Contracts or Lightning Network to be Implemented?

Litecoin SegWit buzz has come and passed. It appears to be sitting in a narrow range and operates under the shadow of the daily hype surrounding Bitcoin, Ethereum, and, "flavor of the day" altcoins. News about Smart Contract or Lightning Network rollout could really light a flame under this and get things moving again. I'm particularly wondering about Smart Contracts given Ethereum's recent success and arrival of many Ethereum based tokens.

From www.altcointoday.com/litecoin-release-roadmap-2017

Litecoin’s quest for smart contracts comes at a time when attention on ethereum continues to remain strong.

Smart contracts, which allow cryptocurrency users to stipulate if-then conditions around how they want money to be paid out, are also much sought-after on bitcoin, where several projects have laid out plans to attempt to upgrade the network for this capability.

Litecoin, based on a fork of the bitcoin code, already allows for simple smart contracts like multi-signatures, where two parties need to sign off on a payment. But the activation of SegWit has opened the door for more complex scripts.

Namely, ‘smart crypt vault’ was one item on the roadmap the developers were particularly excited about. The technology combines Merkelized abstract syntax trees (MAST) and covenants – script combinations that restrict how coins are spent.

Together, they could allow litecoin users to add more complex conditions on payments, similar to what is achieved by ethereum.