The markets are back in the green as we head into the weekend. Litecoin [LTC] is leading the pack with an astronomical (considering bear market conditions) 29% surge in the past 24 hours. Most of those gains have been recorded in the past six or so hours to press time.
Bitcoin, the flagship cryptocurrency has also gained an impressive 8% according to data from Coinmarketcap. Following this gains by Litecoin, the currency has effectively rallied into the top 5 placement at number 4 ahead of EOS and behind Ethereum, both of which are smart contract platforms.
At press time, Litecoin is trading at $42.75 levels with a market cap of $2.58 Billion. EOS, the coin that has held onto the fourth position for the better part of 2018 is now fifth with $2.48 Billion market value. Ethereum, which has also had impressive gains is still third with a market value of $12.47 Billion. Ethereum’s tradable token ether is trading has risen at $119. Ripple’s XRP has maintained its lead as the most valuable altcoin ahead of Ethereum despite experiencing lesser gains over the past 24 hours. XRP is up about 7% in the past 24 hours.
A couple for reason attributed to the impressive Litecoin gains include the speculation of Litecoin’s expected price rally following the forthcoming block reward halving which is scheduled to happen on block #840,000. According to current metrics, this is estimated to happen on August 8th, 2019. The current block rewards for miners will be slashed from 25 LTC down to 12.5 LTC. From an economic standpoint, this should reduce the supply for the coin thereby effectively boosting the price for the asset.
The second most probable reason for the surge in price could be more astutely attributed to yesterday’s announcement from the Litecoin Foundation and Beam Privacy, a software development entity that promises to bring Confidential Transactions to the Litecoin blockchain. On February 3rd, Litecoin creator and managing director to the Litecoin Foundation Charlie Lee announced that he and his team will be working on making Litecoin fungible and more private.
On a follow-up to this announcement, Litecoin Foundation has now partnered with Beam which promises to implement the Mimblewimble protocol to the Litecoin blockchain to make the transactions on the blockchain more private and confidential.
In yesterday’s announcement by Beam Privacy on their Medium blog, the entity wrote that “We have started exploration towards adding privacy and fungibility to Litecoin by allowing on-chain conversion of regular LTC into a Mimblewimble variant of LTC and vice versa. Upon such conversion, it will be possible to transact with Mimblewimble LTC in complete confidentiality.”
