Litecoin (LTC) is fulfilling precisely the use case of its initial vision – to become a fast, cheep tool for payments. For that reason, LTC is once again the winner when it comes to just moving funds. The Litecoin network has relatively low fees, while also offering growing security through mining.
Litecoin is also one of the most active coins on BitPay even in comparison to Bitcoin (BTC). Only two years ago, Litecoin made up 25% of payments on BitPay locations, extending its share since then.
Litecoin is also traded on most major exchanges and can be used for moving funds between wallets. While Litecoin has rallied in the past, it also trades in a relatively predictable way, also serving as a predictable payment tool.
Litecoin Seen as an Investment Wild Card
LTC is currently consolidating around $81.50, surviving the last few corrections with relatively low downside. This time, LTC has not rallied to an outsized gain, but also avoided deep corrections.
While LTC is convenient for spending, there are also signs of accumulation, while waiting for a bigger breakout. LTC was one of the earliest assets to go mainstream through the Grayscale funds. Currently, the funds are matching the market price, while growing their LTC reserves.
BitPay Drives Litecoin Adoption
Litecoin is available on most wallets, but only some apps are active for web-based spending. BitPay facilitates the Litecoin turnover by offering ways to spend the coin within the Internet ecosystem. Gift cards and e-commerce gateways are some specific ways that BitPay makes the Litecoin option available.
As of April 2024, over 37% of all Litecoin payments are going through the BitPay wallet. Trust Wallet and Exodus are also important due to their user-friendly features. These two wallets make up 45% of all LTC coin transfers. There is a small community of users still hanging onto the Litecoin Core wallet, and under 3% use Coinbase wallet.
BitPay also grows the Litecoin network by connecting its owners with hundreds of merchants in its growing selection. BitPay aims to unite the crypto payment potential with the wider fintech ecosystem, finding viable use cases for its portfolio of assets. Recently, BitPay also partnered with MoonPay to add more fiat spending options.
For that reason, BitPay mostly uses a small selection of assets, limiting itself to blue chip coins and some of the most common stablecoins.
BitPay handled more than 341K crypto transactions for the past three months and more than 54K in April alone. BitPay connects those transactions to real-world goods and services, even though this number may be relatively low compared to overall network activity.
The Litecoin Community Brings Active Transaction Turnover
The Litecoin community is a mix of long-term holders and active users. About 30% of the LTC supply is active in a 24-hour period.
On an hourly basis, there are close to 10K transactions on average. LTC is also relatively scarce after miners produced the first 75M coins. There are about 9M coins left to produce, which will include a series of halvings every four years. Litecoin has already completed 11 years without network outages or significant attacks, proving its reliability.
Due to this reason, Litecoin serves as a preferred choice for mid-range transactions, typically with a value of around 108 LTC. The network also carries multiple small transactions of around 1 LTC.
In addition to LTC production, the miners are also supporting the Dogecoin (DOGE) blockchain, where the total DOGE produced is not limited.
Litecoin Active Addresses Going Strong
Litecoin active addresses respond to market trends. From the start of Q2, the Litecoin network has on average around 300K daily active wallets, with spikes in daily activity. On the most active day of 2024, more than 1.3M wallets were active, coinciding with peak market valuations.
Another sign of network health is the mining activity. The average Litecoin hashrate went up around 30% in the past 12 months, surpassing one PetaHash per second.
Litecoin’s network is profitable to mine at scale even at the current market price, offering miners highly liquid rewards.
