It has been a very exciting few weeks for the Litecoin community. The value of the crypto has skyrocketed and its recent trading volume is extremely high as well. This has prompted many to adopt a more serious perception of the asset.
Hardwallet manufacturer TREZOR has recently announced that it will begin supporting Litecoin on their robust and secure device. It may be a little confusing to some why such a well performing altcoin may not be represented on larger cryptocurrency exchanges, but all is about to change as Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong signaled that soon the company will support Litecoin. Litecoin’s creator later confirmed that this was the case in a Tweet depicting a character flipping over a table in excitement.
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
Yes, Litecoin will be added to Coinbase. https://t.co/SU4Wu9iMl3
— Charlie Lee (@SatoshiLite) April 8, 2017
And everyone should be excited. This is huge. The Litecoin community also realizes this, but has expressed some exasperation over how long it has taken them to be added to Coinbase. Previously, the best way to obtain Litecoin was either by mining or exchanging Bitcoin that had been purchased with fiat currencies. That will be a thing of the past as Coinbase will allow its users to purchase Litecoin at the current exchange rate with fiat, rather than having to resort to the roundabout way(s) described above.
This comes at a time where altcoins are looking more and more attractive as far as confirmation times and transactions fees, some call the phenomenon the flippening. Openbazaar is just one of the businesses considering adopting support for various other altcoins. Litecoin is one of the obvious contenders for alternative cryptocurrency payments, and having the support of Coinbase may give it an edge over some of the other well known altcoins like Dogecoin or Dash. Its largest competitor for companies looking for cheaper transactions may be Ethereum, which is already supported on coinbase.
One of the reasons that Litecoin may be seeing a rise in trading volume and a reinvigorated price might be the large pushes from the community and Lee for the adoption of Segregated Witness (SegWit) for Litecoin. Though it may be a contested view whether or not SegWit should be adopted as a User Activated Soft Fork in Litecoin, Lee and many other seem adamant that this will benefit the coin.
Arbitrage would be more viable with lightning wallets, Tumblebit Privacy Tech may be more easily translatable to the Litecoin network with SegWit activated. These are all good things, and Coinbase seems to be rewarding Litecoin for its recent performance.
There may be another aspect in play here of wanting to see Litecoin do well, and it may have to do with a SegWit activation. It would be a very interesting trial run to see how SegWit performs on the Litecoin network before we would see it on the Bitcoin network. As many know, SegWit has been part of the ongoing Core vs Unlimited debate in the world of Bitcoin. Litecoin, with the support it will receive on Coinbase, may be able to show everyone the merits and shortcomings of SegWit in a practical way. This is an enormous moment for Litecoin and I am very happy for the community, but I am also following this development because of what it may mean for Bitcoin and its future.
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