Fundamental Analysis
Litecoin (LTC) is a peer-to-peer digital currency and open-source software project which designed after Bitcoin (BTC).
. In fact, if bitcoin is ‘digital gold,’ Litecoin fashions itself as ‘digital silver’ — and largely piggybacks on everything Bitcoin does. This fact is both Litecoin’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness.
Privacy Coin?
In late Jan and early Feb 2019, members of the Litecoin Foundation made statements about adding enhanced privacy features to LTC. First, Charlie Lee announced his intention to add confidential transactions to the LTC blockchain on Jan 28, 2019. Franklyn Richards furthered the discussion and added that the Foundation was looking to integrate the Mimblewimble protocol into LTC using a soft fork.
Mimblewimble integrates both confidential transaction and CoinJoin innovations to encrypt transaction amounts and their sources. It enables the buyer and seller to remain more anonymous. If Mimblewimble were integrated, the fungibility, privacy, and scalability of LTC could greatly increase while avoiding the contentions of a hard fork. Furthermore, it would add significant market differentiation to the cryptocurrency. Currently, Beam (BEAM) and Grin (GRIN) are the only two coins to use Mimbelwimble.
Halving
In Aug 2019, LTC is expected to undergo its second halving. This means that the miner’s reward will be cut in half from 25 litecoins to just 12.5. This could disincentivize miners to continue mining. In order for miners to continue earning at their current rate, the value of LTC will have to double or transaction fees must significantly increase. An increase in transaction fees may disincentivize the use of LTC. The building of sponsorships and partnerships with organizations like TokenPay, Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), Mammoth Film Festival, and others may, however, increase the value of LTC and, thus, the miner’s reward.”
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SegWit
Like its big brother, Bitcoin, Litecoin supports the soft-fork change in transaction format called Segregated Witness — more commonly known as Segwit. The upgrade continues to become more widely adopted as time progresses, and is an example of how Litecoin benefits from having the same core technology like Bitcoin.
Lightning Network
Just as Litecoin supports Segwit, it also supports the highly-anticipated second-layer payment protocol called The Lightning Network.
The Lightning Network plans to enable lightning-fast micropayments between participating nodes and is quickly becoming a viable solution to Bitcoin’s scaleability concerns — at least for small payments. The Lightning Network is less notably connected to Litecoin, but it is important to note that a successful Lightning Network is not only good for BTC but also LTC.
Exchanges & Wallets
Litecoin (LTC) is exchanged on virtually every cryptocurrency exchange under the sun, and cryptocurrency traders would be hard-pressed to find a reliable exchange which doesn’t support the seventh-ranked cryptocurrency.
Litecoin’s current 24-hour trading volume across tracked exchanges is $375,810,001 USD, according to CoinMarketCap.com.
Litecoin can be stored on most of the most popular hardware wallets, including the CoolWallet S, Opendime, Ledger Nano S, Trezor, KeepKey, and BitBox.
Investors, traders, and hodlers of Litecoin should have no problem finding storing solutions and trading platforms for their LTC.
Charlie Lee Cashed Out at the Top
Litecoin was created by former Google and Coinbase employee Charlie Lee.
Lee famously sold all of his Litecoin at the very top of the cryptocurrency bubble, when LTC was at its all-time high. The creator cited a conflict of interest as the primary reason for selling his stockpile of the cryptocurrency.
Not everyone is convinced that Lee sold his Litecoins for benevolent reasons — especially given the fact that he sold at the very top and undoubtedly earned a sizeable profit.
Prominent silver bull and YouTuber ‘TruthNever Told’ believes Charlie Lee’s Litecoin sale was little more than cashing out of a Ponzi scheme, in which the creator created a rip-off of Bitcoin with no intrinsic value, convinced investors that it was valuable, and then cashed out at the top. While his argument is persuasive, it is worth noting that the YouTuber in question believes all cryptocurrencies are effectively worthless — and thus his opinion should probably not be factored in too seriously when discussing price predictions and forecasts.
