Litecoin Receives Bullish Speculations as Upgrade Approaches
Most of the time, people refer to Litecoin (LTC) as the silver to Bitcoin’s (BTC) gold. And, for this year, LTC investors might be better off inside the analog world. This is because BTC gained twice as much as gold, yet Litecoin barely kept up with silver.
Several investors are seeing a rally building in LTC prices. This still continues with the key upgrade looming and hints that activity is surging on the blockchain network.
Aside from that, the upgrade will put in effect a privacy protocol called ‘MimbleWimble.’ Its purpose is to help protect the identities of holders of senders and recipients of Litecoin tokens. At the same time, it enhances the network’s ability to scale to handle more transactions. A testnet of MimbleWimble, which has been in the works for nearly a year, has aimed to launch for the end of September.
According to market data, it looks like the looming addition is allowing for enthusiasm among users. The daily confirmed transactions on Litecoin’s blockchain has more than doubled for this year. It hits a seven-day average of 48,948 the previous week, the highest since February 2018.
Litecoin backers wish the token’s added privacy features from the WimbleMimble upgrade will help lure in users who contrarily might gravitate toward existing privacy coins, such as Monero (XMR) and zcash (ZEC). The said tokens come with their own risks, like the chance for holders to get diluted by a new issuance.
The Upgrade
Moreover, they expect the upgrade to help Litecoin, which boosted about 50% this year to $63, catch up with Bitcoin’s 64% surge.
The co-founder of Stack (a provider of crypto trackers and index futures), Matthew Dibb, stated, “Litecoin’s upcoming MimbleWimble upgrade has led to a spike in transactions and active addresses.”
Then, based on what the head of trading at NEM Ventures, Nicholas Pelecanos, said, the facility of Litecoin for handling a massive amount of transaction at any moment must increase with the upgrade. This will help solve scalability issues that have deterred several users and investors.
The LTC network’s processing speed has doubled for this year, with about one transaction every two seconds. However, that record is still far slower compared to Bitcoin blockchain. It can handle around 3.7 transactions every second. Then, the upcoming protocol upgrade might continue to boost transaction capacity.
On the other hand, one concern on the added privacy features is that it is not yet clear how they would sit with regulators. Last year, Coinbase UK delisted zcash because of pressure from financial watchdogs. Also, South Korean exchange Upbit delisted privacy coins like Monero, Dash, and zcash in 2019.
Litecoin founder Charlie Lee mentioned that there is a stigma against privacy coins, and a few exchanges have delisted them. He said, “But from what I can tell, the exchanges are ok with this Litecoin privacy upgrade as an extension block because it’s kind of on the side. The exchanges don’t have to support the extension block side of things.”
Also, the project director of the Litecoin Foundation, David Schwartz, tweeted earlier that he thought the cryptocurrency became undervalued.
