With the fall of FTX and the ensuing turn of events, the crypto market skyrocketed to a total market worth of almost $830 billion, which was unusual to see. However, Litecoin’s resurgence fared better than most leading cryptocurrencies.
The “digital silver,” which has a market cap of more than $5.64 billion, reached a high of $81 on November 23rd. It was last trading at this level in May, marking a six-month high at that time.
accumulation of sharks
A robust accumulation tendency persisted among “sharks” prior to the first significant price increase, building to a seven-month high supply holding. Over the previous two weeks, this cohort of addresses holding 1k to 100k LTC tokens has accumulated more than $43 million, as Santiment, a well-known crypto analytic tool, exposed the last two weeks by tweeting;
⚡️ #Litecoin's price surge may have shocked some of you, but the large address accumulation has been the key to watch. In the past 2 weeks, addresses holding 1k to 100k $LTC accumulated $43.4M in coins en route to the first price jump above $80 since May. https://t.co/qkff6FCA1g pic.twitter.com/DM50SjOcAY
— Santiment (@santimentfeed) November 23, 2022
A larger group of LTC whales, with bags ranging from one million to ten million LTC tokens, have also shown a similar tendency, going up from 2.7 million. This further stimulated the cryptocurrency asset’s price movement.
Litecoin’s price was around $150 at the start of the year. However, subsequent market bearishness caused the cryptocurrency value to drop as low as $42 in June. Despite the improvement, it spent the majority of the time locked below $55 before twice in November alone it rose beyond the mark.
It’s interesting to note that Litecoin experienced its first uptrend after MoneyGram, a former Ripple partner and provider of peer-to-peer payments, announced the launch of a new service to purchase, exchange, and store the digital currency earlier this month.
Halving of Litecoin
Eight months before the eagerly anticipated halving event, which will reduce Litecoin’s rate of supply expansion by 50%, there has been a divergence from the market-wide drop. The third halving of mining payouts, scheduled for August 2023, would reduce the rewards given to LTC miners for logging transactions on the blockchain from 12.5 LTC per block to 6.25 LTC per block.
Litecoin’s narrative changed from being bearish to being bullish in the months preceding its two previous halving cycles in 2015 and 2019.
