In a month where cryptocurrencies started to suffer again, Litecoin was perhaps the only prominent cryptocurrency to have done well in February. The cryptocurrency also returned to a market cap of double digits alongside a return to a valuation above $200. It outperformed Bitcoin which fell instead of growing this month.
In general, all cryptocurrencies have had a rough time recovering from the multiple crashes that have occurred in 2018. At one point, the crypto market had recovered back above a $500 billion market cap. However, the market is back down to $450 billion. Despite the setbacks, Litecoin has done quite well over the past few weeks. It’s one of the few currencies to be showing green. Starting at $142 and a market cap of $7.8 billion, the currency enters March at $213 and a market cap of $11.8 billion.
What is Litecoin?
Litecoin (LTC) is a peer to peer cryptocurrency that lets users make payments across the world with close to zero costs really fast. The currency has a fully decentralized network and its software is open source, thus, you can run, copy or modify it anytime.
The currency is pretty similar to Bitcoin. This is because it takes a lot of inspiration from Bitcoin. Many people call LTC the better version of Bitcoin due to its fast transactions and low transaction costs. Overall, achieving the things Litecoin’s technology is able to achieve is not easy for many cryptocurrencies which makes Litecoin a much more preferable option. The currency is also easy to mine which invites a host of other users.
What made it have such a good month?
Litecoin has lots of advantages over other cryptocurrencies, especially Bitcoin. Not only are LTC transactions faster and cheaper, but the total amount of LTC to be generated over the course of its existence is 84 million, 4 times more than Bitcoin! Moreover, Litecoin can also generate blocks more quickly and efficiently. Therefore, without changing any software, the currency is able to support more transactions at a time.
Another key feature of Litecoin is its Scrypt mining algorithm. Not only is this algorithm responsible for making LTC transactions faster, but it also makes the mining process easier. Many currencies are very hard to mine, mainly because the cost of mining is greater than the return. However, it’s not hard to mine Litecoin tokens and given Litecoin’s current prices, one can make a good amount of money through mining.
Miners currently receive 25 LTC tokens per block mined. This value gets halved every 4 years. The current price of Litecoin is $213. Thus, one can make a decent amount of money through mining Litecoin.
Moreover, Litecoin also offers wallet encryption. This feature allows users to secure their wallets, which has become a necessity nowadays. Millions of dollars worth crypto tokens have been stolen due to online hackers. Thus, wallet security is essential now. Wallet encryption lets you track your transactions and takes a number of steps to ensure your wallet is safe from online hackers.
Perhaps one of the most important reasons for Litecoin’s recent success is LitePay. This is a Visa like ATM card service that lets people access and use their Litecoin for transactions or for withdrawals. The card works on any Visa supported ATM and takes care of conversions in real time. Thus, through LitePay, Litecoin is perhaps the most easily accessible currency right now. Not only that, LitePay also lets businesses and merchants add cryptocurrency as a payment option for their customers. It’s an overall win-win.
Litecoin also got a boost thanks to Bloomberg as it was added to their Terminal in early February which allowed clients to track Litecoin’s progress alongside other cryptocurrencies. Although Litecoin is far away from its all-time high, it has still done pretty well given the performance of the rest of the crypto market. If Litecoin is able to sustain this level of growth, it can easily be one of the highlight currencies of 2018.