Late April Update: Technicals

On the daily LTCUSD chart, LTC is currently touching the bullish trendline that acts as a support zone. Additionally, it has formed a symmetrical triangle which would indicate a continuation of the long-term bullish trend. It is likely that LTC moves upwards to test the resistance level at $90.

Trading volume is big but questionable – reported volume in the last 24hrs is $2.6 b and “Real 10” (trading volume on the exchanges that provably prevent wash trading) volume is of course much lower – $69 million. This means that LTC’s liquidity is highly inflated and overstated by whopping 37x.

Moreover, LTC comparatively has a solid buy support, according to coinmarketbook.cc. Buy support is measuring sum of buy orders at 10% distance from the highest bid price. This way we can eliminate fake buy walls and whale manipulation and see the real interest of the market in a certain coin. LTC currently has a sound $19m of buy orders measured with this method, which sets LTC buy support/market cap ratio at 0.43%, a slightly above average value. Bitcoin and Ethereum have a 0.27% and 0.28% ratios, respectively. This novel metric indicates there are a lot of manipulations, inflated liquidity and fake orders on all crypto trading pairs, including LTC pairs.

Litecoin’s sentiment score, measured by the market analytics firm Predicoin, paints a neutral picture.

Predicoin wraps its analysis up into a single simple indicator known as the SentScore, which is formed from the combination of five different verticals:

Interpreting the SentScore’s scale:

Litecoin currently has a Sentscore of 4.9, a significant drop from the 6.5 it had back on April 10th. Overall, Predicoin’s Sentscore is an excellent indicator of community interest and can provide useful insight into which coins are trending right now. Litecoin is obviously not one of them.

Below is our long-term forecast where we cover general market movements and sentiment shifts before delving deeper into the specific predictions for LTC.

Litecoin was created back on 7th Oct 2011 by Charlie Lee, an ex-Google employee, who quit working in order to focus on Litecoin full time. Charlie is very active on Twitter. You can read his blog here. Litecoin was designed to complement Bitcoin by solving issues like transaction timings and concentrated mining pools.

Litecoin [LTC] is one of the coins that suffered biggest hit by the bear market. The overall market cap has dropped below $2.5 billion and seems the shedding is not over yet.

It is a well known fact that Charlie Lee sold at the peak of LTC price and tweeted a very good advice to the rest of the holders: On December 12th, 2017, Charlie Lee sent out a tweet telling people not to get too excited with the unsustainable bull run. Charlie warned about the pending multi-year bear market and that anyone who could not handle Litecoin (LTC) dropping to $20 should not buy it. While many attacked him as a FUD instigator, his reasons for making these assertions were rock solid and since LTC is now hovering just aboe $30. Charlie explained that every time the crypto market rises up too fast, it overshoots its real value, which leads to a huge correction, and a price consolidation. Charlie’s predictions have come true.

Charlie is not active in LTC for quite some time – it has been years since he contributed to the development of the once second largest cryptocurrency, that is now ranked at number 7 on CMC rankings.

Being dubbed the silver to Bitcoin’s gold, Litecoin was introduced in 2011 as a quick fix that was supposed to solve some problems typical of Bitcoin. With new projects flooding the market in the recent years, Litecoin’s role seems to be thing of a past – LTC is the odd man out and nobody can bring about a solid argumentation for Litecoin’s purpose in the future. And the reason I think Litecoin is dead is not because of its price – it dropped together with the whole market and not by its own fault. The reason is lack of unique value proposition – it is just blunt copy of bitcoin with couple of parameters changed.

It was that back in 2011 and it is that still in 2018. This lack of vision and will for separation from bitcoin and creation of your own niche will cost Litecoin its existence.

Litecoin can do everything Bitcoin can and it is often called a testnet for bitcoin. But who needs a multi-billion testnet – who needs two identical projects as one is enough and this is a winner takes all battle.

Litecoin depends on Bitcoin. This is not just a hypothesis, this was Charlie’s vision from the project’s inception.

LTC enjoyed the treatment as a bitcoin’s little brother – technology was similar so exchanges and wallets could easily integrate it where ever they integrated bitcoin. This gave it exposure and liquidity which drove its price up especially as many would use it for faster transactions between exchanges or wallets as it had faster transaction time than bitcoin. In the meantime, there are many other coins that can be used for this purpose that are even faster and cheaper, almost free (Nano for example).

With Coinbase and other exchanges adding new projects, the top 10 market caps being dominated by some very diverse and colorful coins and a general lack of media attention and focus on Litecoin unless it makes some significant price movement, I’m not sure what would motivate new comers do the research necessary to learn about Litecoin’s potential.

So if Litecoin’s utility as a micro-payment solution is now in question, where does it stand? I suppose it could be the “silver” to Bitcoin’s “gold”, but if Bitcoins are (basically) infinitely divisible and act as a good store of value, then what does Litecoin do?

As Bitcoin network keeps being optimized and upgraded with new innovations like Lightning Network, use cases of Litecoin will disappear and so will its reason to exist.

Litecoin doesn’t have the name recognition that Bitcoin has. It does have a fantastic advantage to make improvements to itself much faster than Bitcoin does, but with the rise of so many other projects that have base codes that are already more fit for micro-transactions and scaling, has Litecoin missed the train? I would say yes.

LTC will continue to drop as investors move towards projects that are more realistic in their goals. If anyone replaces fiat, it is going to be bitcoin and not litecoin. Litecoin’s boon and curse has been its mirroring of bitcoin – they enjoyed the ride in the past but with every market contraction, we will lose projects that have no reason to exist, like Litecoin.

LTC, as the rest of the market, is tightly coupled and dependent on bitcoin’s price action. If bitcoin embarks on another bull run, LTC can hope for one as well. Since that is very unlikely, don’t expect much to change for LTC price-wise in this year. So 2019 will be a year of boring sideways action with minor bitcoin ignited jumps and slumps.

In general:

The main currency in cryptocurrency markets is Bitcoin and given this, altcoins tend to fuel Bitcoin runs and Bitcoin tends to do the same in return. Given this relationship, Bitcoin price movements (or lack thereof) tend to effect altcoin prices.

When Bitcoin goes up swiftly, it will likely:

In cases when Bitcoin plunges, it will likely:

When Bitcoin moves sideways, it will likely:

To summarize, Bitcoin is the focal point of the crypto market in many ways, and with BTC trading pairs on every exchange, the gravity of Bitcoin is hard to evade.

The majority of projects will fail — some startups are created just to gather funds and disappear, some would not handle the competition, but most are just ideas that look good on paper, but in reality, are useless for the market. 

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum said:

“There are some good ideas, there are a lot of very bad ideas, and there are a lot of very, very bad ideas, and quite a few scams as well”

As a result, over 95% of successful ICOs and cryptocurrency projects will fail and their investors will lose money. The other 5% of projects will become the new Apple, Google or Alibaba in the cryptoindustry. Will LTC be among those 5%? Hard to tell but probability for that is higher than with most other coins primarily for 2 reasons: solid use case and legit team behind the project.

All of this summed up means one thing: LTC might live through couple of orchestrated and, for a regular trader, completely unpredictable pumps but the majority of time will be murky sideways trading with small volume and no significant interest from the market. 

Price will heavily depend on what BTC will do and since many analysts think BTC will not be making big moves in this year, it is hard to expect LTC will do them either. The price will probably stagnate and record slow-moving depreciation or appreciation depending on the team activity, potential technological breakthrough or high-level partnership.

Litecoin is an original gangster coin, bitcoin’s copy from the old days, one of the strongest brands in crypto space. Let’s check what are the market experts or crypto editorials saying.

A crypto forecast website called trading beasts predicted that by the end of 2019, LTC might reach around $80, and only a bit higher in 2020 – predicted to rise up to $95.

Here comes a more optimistic prediction of cryptoground, where they say that by 2019 end, LTC might reach $90, and in five years litecoin might reach $324.

CoinFan is a website that offers price forecasts for every relevant cryptocurrency. Their algorithm is awfully bullish as they predict that Litcoin might reach $472 by 2019 end, and might reach $1687 by 2020 end.

Wallet Investor is known for their pragmatic cryptocurrency prediction. They believe that LTC might drop to single digits – $3.17 by December 2019, where the year high price might be around $45.

The post Litecoin (LTC) Price Forecast 2019 – LTC is Slowly Tapering Off (Late April Update) appeared first on CaptainAltcoin.

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