LTC price surges as the Litecoin Foundation and Beam enter cooperation to implement the Mimblewimble privacy protocol on the Litecoin network through Extension Blocks.
By Bhushan Akolkar
Updated
3 mins read
On Friday, February February 8, Bitcoin and the overall cryptocurrency market made a much-needed relief recovery. However, the start of the show was Litecoin posting a massive 30% recovery in a single day. At the press time, Litecoin (LTC) is trading at a price of $43.72 with a market cap of $2.63 billion. Friday’s recovery has helped Litecoin reclaim its position in the top five digital currencies after slipping down last year.
This massive price recovery also gives huge relief to LTC investors as the cryptocurrency lost over 90% in 2018 bearish year. Earlier during the 2017 bull run, Litecoin had surged to hit its all-time high of $350.
One of the major reasons behind Litecoin’s price surge is the announcement of the cooperation between the Litecoin Foundation and Beam. The Litecoin foundation is seeking help and expertise of Beam to implement the Mimblewimble protocol on the Litecoin network through Extension Blocks.
Since long, Beam is working on improving privacy in the cryptocurrency sector while promoting the Mimblewimble protocol. The company explains:
“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.”
It added:
“Upon such conversion, it will be possible to transact with Mimblewimble LTC in complete confidentiality.”
Since the beginning of 2019, Litecoin developers have shown their intent on implementing Confidential Transactions and Mimblewimble. These solutions were initially developed for the Bitcoin blockchain network back in July 2016.
But with Litecoin and Bitcoin networks having a similar structure, LTC developers are also able to work with it. Last month, Litecoin founder Charlie Lee tweeted that the LTC community is actively working to complete the implementation of Confidential Transactions by end of 2019.
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 Ⓜ️🕸️ (@SatoshiLite) January 28, 2019
Charlie Lee further added:
“Litecoin dev team spent hours discussing how to add Confidential Transactions. The way to do a softfork CT is very similar to doing extension blocks and extension blk may be simpler and can do a lot more”.
Many of the popular cryptocurrency analysts claim that despite the jump to $43, LTC is facing crucial resistance at these levels. Crytpo analyst The Crypto Dog said that he is offloading his LTC at $43 before taking further long positions. The Crypto Dog said that LTC is lacking enough volumes to further pull it northwards.
https://twitter.com/TheCryptoDog/status/1093811576577114112
Another popular crypto analyst Don Alt noted that LTC/BTC is nearing its resistance at 0.015 BTC, that is slightly higher that LTC’s current price of 0.0117 BTC.
There she goes.
One more resistance to break and then the sky will be clear.
I'm rarely ultra bullish at resistance but when the chart looks that nice it's the way to go. pic.twitter.com/ZaulAblvdT— DonAlt (@CryptoDonAlt) February 2, 2019
Last week on February 4, a tweet from Moon Overload showed that LTC was heading for $50. Here’s what he said.
https://twitter.com/MoonOverlord/status/1092137649563947009
It will be interesting to see where does LTC go from here onwards.
Bhushan is a FinTech enthusiast and holds a good flair in understanding financial markets. His interest in economics and finance draw his attention towards the new emerging Blockchain Technology and Cryptocurrency markets. He is continuously in a learning process and keeps himself motivated by sharing his acquired knowledge. In free time he reads thriller fictions novels and sometimes explore his culinary skills.
