Litecoin, which is the 7th largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization has had some recent advancements. Let us cover some of these recent advancements to understand its adoption and future potential.
Litecoin covered the UFC
This was a really famous fight that did happen and the litecoin logo was on the mat all the time. Billions of people watched that on pay-per-view. That is actually very big. You have a great exercise in brand awareness of introducing litecoin to people who have never heard about litecoin before.
Other Adoptions:
- Surf Air which is a private flight company operating in the west coast of the United States is now accepting litecoin.
- A Brazilian supermarket chain operating in Rio De Janeiro called Oasis are now accepting litecoin, bitcoin and bitcoin cash.
- A Singapore shopping center added a new bitcoin and litecoin atm.
Under the hood:
There are some other interesting things happening with litecoin recently. For example, we see the lightning network on litecoin passing over a hundred nodes which is a great step forward for the lightning network on litecoin. Also, coingate.com is going to bring 1000 merchants to litecoin lightning.
Also, people have been talking about fungibility coming to litecoin. So essentially we could see a privacy feature added to litecoin for the sake of increasing fungibility.
Now, unfortunately, there would be no way they are imagining anyway for it to be a default for every transaction so it is probably going to be optional like we have for Zcash and some other cryptocurrencies. So it won’t be privacy all the time. But we cannot expect this to happen overnight, Charlie Lee has been throwing the idea around for quite some time now and we haven’t seen it come live yet.
Litecoin buys 9.9% in WEG Bank:
Last year, Litecoin bought around 10% stake in a German Bank called WEG Bank which will help them provide all kinds of things that really wouldn’t be possible without having that stake in a bank. Things that will let them drive mainstream adoption of cryptocurrencies such as remittances, lending, micro-finance, e-commerce etc. All of this stuff can be done in a much easier fashion by having a piece of that important part of the traditional world’s architecture.
Overall litecoin remains good sound money with a strong network of miners backing it up. It is, of course, the number one script mined coin which makes it much more difficult to attack litecoin.
Litecoin Price
Considering that currently, we see litecoin with around 1/10th of its price that it did have at its all-time high, it does seem to be an interesting investment opportunity but a lot of other cryptocurrencies can say the same thing. Allot of them have seen their values decrease by 80% to 99% so it isn’t the cheapest one in terms of overall losses in the bear market but litecoin does have a lot going forward. It has a very strong community and growing merchant adoption but the real thing that could make litecoin a very interesting investment in 2019 is the litecoin halving. This is when the block reward is going to drop by 50% so all of a sudden litecoin is going to become very rare. When we add that all to merchant adoption and when we see it listed on more and more exchanges, we kind of understand the power of litecoin to continue moving forward in spite of tough market conditions and it does offer a very interesting investment opportunity.
In 2019, we could see some very interesting price movements on litecoin especially we if see an overall market recovery. But the litecoin halving which is around 200 days away could be a real catalyst for the price later in the year.
What are your personal thoughts on litecoin and its future potential? Tell us in the comments section below.
Disclaimer: The following article is not financial advice. The readers are advised to do thorough research and analysis before making any investment decisions in the cryptocurrency market.
