Litecoin has been in existence since 2011. The market was swept with new altcoins (shitcoins?) in the last two years which saw Litecoin drop behind in media coverage and buyer’s attention.

Once second largest cryptocurrency, Litecoin got pushed down by new projects one by one to its current 7th position in the rankings of crypto coins by their respective market caps.

The most important thing for Litecoin in 2019 is to stay clear of being classified as just another shitcoin. Essentially, staying relevant is the number one goal for Charlie Lee and team behind LTC.

Ever since Lee sold his coins around price peak, he lost some credibility among crypto enthusiasts and, even though Charlie vehemently denies it, that event did considerable damage to Litecoin’s reputation. The popular motto of crypto “skin in the game” was violated by this sale and many holders followed suit as they don’t want to hold coins of a project whose founder is perceived to have no faith in its success.

With Coinbase adding more altcoins with each passing month, LTC’s main price driver is diminished as the buyer’s attention is diluted with shiny new coins he can buy (ETC, BAT, ZRX etc).

Other coins with similar use cases are are bringing at least something unique to the table: NANO is fastest and fee-less, XMR, ZEC, DASH are fungible and private, XRP and XLM are fast and have strong companies behind them, DCR has innovative governance model etc.

Litecoin will be happy to be alive at the end of 2019.

It is the standard state of Litecoin to sit and wait for bitcoin developers to push new upgrades so LTC can port them to their blockchain. I am still perplexed as to what is the point of such project. Additionally, LTC shows almost no activity on its chain as expressed through valuable on-chain metrics like number of on-chain transactions, active addresses, block size, NVT ratio etc. As we wrote earlier this week, voices about the LTC senseless existence are getting louder, noting the same thing I mentioned above.

“A good time to remind you all that $LTC is completely worthless. On-chain transactions are a joke. Last 5 blocks are all smaller than 30kb, network is totally empty. It’s not used for payments, it’s not used for anything.”

A good time to remind you all that $LTC is completely worthless. On-chain transactions are a joke. Last 5 blocks are all smaller than 30kb, network is totally empty. It's not used for payments, it's not used for anything. https://t.co/tnQd8eXWrh

This was a reaction to the news that Coinbase moved around $5 billion in value of crypto tokens as a part of their system upgrade. As Frank Chaparo of The Block reported,

“The $5 billion number represents 5% of all bitcoin, 8% of the total supply of ether, and 25% of all litecoin.”

Do you know what is Litecoin Cash all about?

This news bamboozled Dogecoin founder and renown crypto commentator Jackson Palmer as he questioned if people leaving their private keys on centralized exchanges defeats the foundational principle of cryptocurrencies.

Litecoin on-chain metrics are as paltry as it gets. The blockchain recorded only 21k transactions in the past 24 hours, which is 10x less than bitcoin and 150x less than EOS who is leading the market in tx numbers.

Not only that, but the block sizes are, as Paul Everton highlighted, well below 30kb meaning there is simply no transactions on the network to fill the blocks so miners pick up the block rewards by mining almost empty blocks.

Bitcoin and Litecoin have had the same blocksize limit of 1MB. After first Litecoin and then Bitcoin activated segwit, they now again have the same blockweight limit of 4MB.

However, that only determines the maximum size the blockchain could have had by now. We don’t need to store data for unused blockspace!

Since the block header only makes up 80 bytes of data, the transaction data makes up the brunt of the blockchain. It turns out that even though Litecoin has had almost three times as many blocks (1,420,460) than Bitcoin (522,429) due to its faster interval, Litecoin has had much fewer transactions. Lately, Litecoin blocks have had an average size of 31 kB, while Bitcoin’s have had about 815 kB in the past month.

Litecoin’s hashrate is also down, just like the one of bitcoin. At its peak, LTC had around 350 Terahashes securing the network. That number is now almost two times smaller – 150TH.

For a cryptocurrency that was supposed to be the frequent, small transaction size alternative to BTC, Litecoin has failed to catch up in terms of volume as it only had $73 milion of onchain volume. Compare that to the $3.4 billion of BTC or $1.0 billion of BCH.

Besides volume, its median transaction value also proves that virtually nobody uses it for its intended purpose: small transactions, such as buying coffee or groceries. Its median transaction value was $50 to DASH’s (another pretender to the payment currency throne) $15.

Litecoin announced today that they will be collabing with X9 Developers, a blockchain-agnostic team of developers who created and developed a project called Stakenet (XSN).

The LF has formalized a collaboration with @X9developers of @XSNofficial in the maintenance, and hardening of ltcd. They’ve recently brought ltcd up to speed with btcd. This enables #litecoin support on neutrino, a light LN client. Read more here: https://t.co/cPeCMGZ6qK

X9 Developers have already implemented a beta version of cross-chain atomic swaps via the Lightning Network available for testing between XSN and LTC. Their current focus is to improve the user experience of the LN and develop a “one click” solution for LN atomic swaps. The collab is expected to make Lightning Network app development easier as the developer won’t have to run a full node anymore. Redditor Yankeeruinx explains the importance of this collab in detail:2 more days to buy TradingView with 60% off

“Well one of the biggest issues with LN currently is liquidity and decentralisation. Stakenet fixes this by using their own MN network as Lightning Nodes, they currently have around 1900 nodes so that solves the decentralisation part. As for liquidity Stakenet also uses the MN collateral to provide the liquidity in the network. Once activated they should overnight become more liquid than even BTC on LN. BTC currently has a capacity of $1.7M roughly and as of right now Stakenet would have over $3M”

Lightning Network has been picking up the pace as of late, with over 500 BTC currently present on it.

The post What will be a success for Litecoin (LTC) in 2019? Probably just staying alive. appeared first on CaptainAltcoin.

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