Litecoin, the Bitcoin rival founded by the Litecoin Foundation’s highly respected managing director Charlie Lee, has rallied today, rising 10% over the last 24 years and bolstering the wider cryptocurrency market, including ethereum, Ripple ‘s XRP, and Bitcoin, despite recent warnings about the weakness in Bitcoin.
The Litecoin price appreciated to $37 after falling below last month’s psychological $30 price in the midst of a Bitcoin and cryptocurrency bear market that has been pulling down the industry for the past 13 months.
Litecoin plunged to a low of about $22 late last year as the so-called crypto-winter took its toll, about 93% down from its all-time high. According to CoinMarketCap prices, the dramatic increase in Litecoin saw it outpace first Bitcoin cash, an offshoot of the original Bitcoin, and then EOS, an ethereum rival, moving to fourth place in the list of the world’s largest cryptocurrencies by market value.
Litecoin ‘s ascend comes after yesterday’s news that the Litecoin Foundation and Beam, a software development facility with its own cryptocurrency, formally agreed to work together to investigate whether Litecoin should enforce the MimbleWimble protocol, named after a spell from Harry Potter that prevents people from leaking secrets and aimed at improving privacy and scalability.
In a Medium post, Beam wrote, “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.”
In its blog post, Litecoin Foundation has said “Lee has previously mentioned in various conversations his interest and hesitation with MimbleWimble but had hoped that the community would adopt the change if it proved to be a worthwhile upgrade to the network.”
The implementation of MimbleWimble will also assist the aspirations of the Litecoin Foundation to make Litecoin more fungible, meaning that one Litecoin, or a smaller denomination, can be transitioned to the next without drop in value. Paper money is considered extremely fungible as one bill of $20 can be exchanged for another bill of $10 or two.
Elsewhere, the price increase in Litecoin has knocked out the slump in the wider cryptocurrency market, with investors getting up this morning to a sea of green on trading platform. Tradable token Ethereum increased by 2% over the past 24 hours, while ripple (XRP) rose 1% and EOS gained nearly 2%.
The Bitcoin price has steadily dropped since it reached an all-time high of nearly $20,000 in December 2017, enabling many Bitcoin, cryptocurrency and blockchain startups to cut jobs or completely close down and keeping investors anxious for signals of how the market will move next.
Bitcoin and cryptocurrency hype captured the world in 2017, with certain major coins, including Ripple’s XRP, Ethereum and Litecoin, as the percentage of prices rises far beyond bitcoin.
