What Caused Litecoin to Surge Over 30% and Flip BCH and EOS?

Litecoin has long been a stalwart of the crypto sphere. It has been around since 2011 when it forked from the original Bitcoin chain. Alongside its big brother it has steadily grown as a faster and ‘lighter’ alternative. Over the past 24 hours however Litecoin has literally lifted off with a 30% surge propelling it up the crypto market cap charts.

New Partnership to Enhance Litecoin

The entire crypto market has enjoyed a rare pump overnight as $10 billion poured back into digital assets following a week of losses. That is not to say that the bear market is over, far from it as we have seen this action before and the bears may soon regain control. Technical indicators are still signaling further losses for Bitcoin and its brethren over the coming months.

The top performing altcoin during this crypto bounce has been Litecoin. The solid performance is fundamental as software company Beam recently announced a partnership with the Litecoin Foundation. The collaboration will explore the use of Litecoin’s Mimblewimble protocol which derives its name from the Harry Potter series. It is a spell that prevents people spilling secrets so was aptly named as its purpose for crypto is to improve privacy, scalability and fungibility. The Beam medium post added;

“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,”

A hard fork would be required if Litecoin was to adopt the protocol which allows users to encrypt transaction data. The fungibility aspect would allow equivalent tokens to be interchangeable with no losses. Charlie Lee posted this tweet last month on the need for such;

Fungibility is the only property of sound money that is missing from Bitcoin & Litecoin. Now that the scaling debate is behind us, the next battleground will be on fungibility and privacy. I am now focused on making Litecoin more fungible by adding Confidential Transactions. ???? — Charlie Lee [LTC⚡] (@SatoshiLite) January 28, 2019

Market Reaction

Litecoin’s performance over the past 24 hours has been impressive. It jumped from an intraday low of just over $33 to a high a touch below $44 which results in a 33% surge on the day. Since then LTC has pulled back a little to trade at $42.30 where it is currently holding at the time of writing.

Daily volume surged from $635 million to $1.7 billion which pumped over $500 million into the LTC market cap. This enabled Litecoin to surge up the charts and flip both Bitcoin Cash and EOS to take fourth spot with a current market cap of $2.6 billion. So far this year Litecoin has been one of the top performing cryptocurrencies along with Tron and Binance Coin.

Litecoin is also due for a halving this year on August 8 which reduces the block reward from 25 to 12.5 LTC. Halving events are usually very bullish for crypto assets as they become less inflationary while value goes up.