For everyone interested in getting started investing in crypto but feel that they missed the BTC & Ethereum boat... Litecoin (LTC) will experience explosive returns over the next 2 years.
-Recently Litecoin was updated with the "SEGWIT" update which is short for Segregated Witness. It's a way to increase capacity and scale the network but also comes with fixes and builds a base for further updates.
SEGWIT was developed by the BTC development team originally for BTC - but LTC has installed it first due to more laxed minimum hashing requirements.
-With the SEGWIT update - LTC also installed "Lightning Network" at the same time and this update is also now in production. Lightning network will allow developers all over the world to build applications using instant micropayments.
-Next week (Week Beginning 6/19) LTC will be added to one of the oldest Bitcoin exchanges - Bitstamp. This creates yet another fiat to LTC gateway.
-For years the LTC development team were all volunteers. Recently, however, with donations from exchanges that offer Litecoin trading, the LTC dev team now has a steady income. This is the first time LTC has had full time paid staff. Sometime last year LTC got the first full time developer and the 2nd full time developer is currently in training.
-Charlie Lee, Litecoin's creator, originally worked at Google. Sometime after founding Litecoin he switched careers to Coinbase - the largest Bitcoin/Litecoin/Ethereum exchange. Just 2 days ago Charlie announced that he is resigning as the head engineer of Coinbase to focus completely on advancing Litecoin. This is huge news for the Litecoin community and the price has already increased 5%+ since the announcement.
-In 2019 the Litecoin code is scheduled to halve the inflation rate of the currency. Each time this has happened in the past there have been wild price rises that follow. I believe it is conservative to say that LTC will be above $60 in 2019-2020 due to this factor alone - not including every other point I am making.
-The "Rootstock (RSK)" team is working to incorporate LTC into it's platform as well. RSK is the first open-source smart contract platform with a 2-way peg to Bitcoin that also rewards the Bitcoin miners via merge-mining, allowing them to actively participate in the Smart Contract revolution. RSK goal is to add value and functionality to the Bitcoin ecosystem by enabling smart-contracts, near instant payments and higher-scalability. Smart contracts is one of the reasons for Ethereum's explosive growth from $8 to $350 in just a year or so.
-Last year the Litecoin team released a roadmap that includes the plan to code in anonymous transactions to increase fungibility. This is the reason for extreme price rises in other coins that specialize in fungibility.
Litecoin in all of it's entire history has never had more good news lined up for it than now. For that reason I am strongly suggesting a buy and hold strategy for LTC for 2 years minimum.