60% Of The Total Supply Of Litecoin Was Just Moved In A Mysterious Transaction

The cryptocurrency community is filled with mysterious transactions. One of the world’s most mysterious transactions, however, just took place this past week when $1.1 billion of Litecoin was moved in a single day.

On November 30, 2018, the Litecoin network experienced a sudden surge in the total 24 hour trading volume. Approximately 35,400,000 LTC was traded in a single day. That’s approximately $1.1 billion worth of Litecoin at a price of $31 per coin.

Stated another way, approximately 60% of the supply of Litecoin was transferred in one 24 hour period.

There is rarely more than $1 billion in trading volume on the Litecoin network. The last time over $1 billion was moved in a single day was in February 2018 when panic was sweeping the altcoin space.

Since February, the Litecoin network has recorded approximately $100 million of trading volume per day, on average.

That’s why the November 30 transactions were so prominent. Suddenly and unexpectedly, there was a massive surge in trading volume on the network.

A significant portion of the Litecoin network’s trading volume appears to have come from a single entity. Here’s how the blog post at Litecoin.com described the sudden movement of coins:

“A significant portion of the volume appears to have come from a single entity as over 40 new wallets have just entered the top 100 rich list on the network all with a balance of 300,000 Litecoin (~$10,000,000) each, which accounts for over 12M Litecoin (~$372M at time of transfer, $31 per coin).”

In other words, the coins appear to have been moved into at least 40 identical wallets with $10 million of Litecoin inside each. All 40 of these wallets are now on the Litecoin rich list with identical balances.

The team at Litecoin.com appears to be baffled by this sudden and mysterious movement of Litecoins.

“Analysis of global exchange trading does not account for this sheer volume and yet neither does it appear to be a direct consolidation of funds from other addresses. It’s also not yet clear whether this is an exchange moving its users funds offline or OTC traded funds being moved into private wallet addresses.”

In other words, they have no idea where these Litecoins came from or the reason for the movement.

Exchanges did not record Litecoin purchasing volume that was unusually high in recent days or weeks. That gives us two possibilities:

The best guess is that this is a whale taking a serious position in Litecoin at the bottom of the market (or at least where the whale may perceive the bottom of the market to be).

If this is a single person in control of Litecoin, then it indicates that the whale now owns 15% of the total supply of Litecoin in circulation, making that person the single largest LTC holder overnight.

The most likely scenario would be an institutional investor taking a serious long position on Litecoin. That investor purchased Litecoin in an OTC trade and withdrew it to 40 identical wallet addresses.

This would be good news for the market for several reasons.

First, it means that 12 million Litecoin are out of circulation, alleviating significant selling pressure on the market.

Second, it means that someone believes this is the bottom of the market for LTC. By buying a $1.1 billion stake in LTC today, the investor is hoping the price will increase in the near future.

Unfortunately for the individual, the bet has already gone south – at least slightly. Litecoin has dropped from $31 on November 30 to $29.57 today. LTC is down 5.7% over the last 24 hours, similar to losses across the crypto community.

It’s easy to forget that just one year ago, in December 2017, LTC was selling at an all-time high of $359.84. Since then, LTC has collapsed along with the rest of the crypto space.

Somebody, somewhere, appears to have just made a $1.1 billion bet that Litecoin will turn around. We’ll keep you posted if the identity of this individual becomes known – similar to other whales like Spoofy or Loaded. One this is for sure: we’ll know immediately if any of the Litecoins in those 40 wallet addresses start to move.

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