Litecoin is the 5th largest cryptocurrency based the market cap.
Price: $26 per coin.
Current circulating supply: 51 million coins.
Market cap: $1.3 billion.
24 hr Volume: $102 million.
Miners are currently awarded with 25 new litecoins per block.
Litecoin was launched in 2011 and it is open source. Although it was developed to optimize the bitcoin code base and the fact that it has consistently made the top 10 cryptocurrencies according to market cap, Litecoin has been criticized for a lack of technological development.
Despite the criticisms in the past, you may have noticed that recently, Litecoin has been in the crypto news for implementing what is called Segregated Witness, or SegWit.
I suggest you check out the link here for my past video that goes into depth on what exactly SegWit is.
In the meantime I want to explain why the adoption of SegWit has helped Litecoin to rejuvenate it’s presence in crypto land.
If you’re familiar with the Bitcoin block size debate, you might also recognize that SegWit is a proposal to help remedy that situation.
Litecoin is nowhere near the transaction volumes of Bitcoin, and doesn’t necessarily need to implement SegWit right now, but when you couple that information with the fact that Litecoin was developed to optimize the bitcoin code base, you may begin to piece things together and see how Litecoin’s adoption of SegWit can be a way to prove to Bitcoin that it is a viable solution.
It’s interesting to note that the same mining pools that are against the bitcoin adoption of SegWit have gotten on board with the Litecoin adoption of the scaling solution.
Now with this adoption of SegWit, comes those who originally wished to build their projects on the SegWit of Bitcoin.
They can now use Litecoin as a live, public blockchain with which to test out their projects.
This all leads to more of a spotlight on Litecoin, at least, a brighter one than it’s had in the past.
Litecoin has also been added to the popular exchange Coinbase
The site that is very particular when considering supporting cryptos other than Bitcoin. They chose to support Ethereum only after deciding that their smart contracts were a great improvement that differentiated it enough from Bitcoin to deserve their support.
Now that Litecoin has adopted SegWit, this led to an increase of both price and volume. Because of the increased liquidity of Litecoin- and perhaps a bit due to the fact that the creator of Litecoin has also been the director of engineering at Coinbase for the past 4 years- Coinbase has officially added Litecoin to it’s ranks.
Litecoin’s creator, Charlie Lee has implied that he sees Litecoin as a way to test future bitcoin features.
This could cause a rise in interest in Litecoin due to the fact that there are many projects that were interested in building on the SegWit of bitcoin are now presented the opportunity to use Litecoin as a place to test it out on a live, public blockchain.
Additional Reading/Sources:
CoinMarketCap
Official Website
CoinDesk Article 1
CoinDesk Article 2
TechCrunch Article