Litecoin Value Soars due to SegWit Activation

The past few days have been quite exciting for the Litecoin community. After weeks of waiting to see Segregated Witness activate on the network, that has now officially happened. As was to be expected, the LTC price started to rise steeply over the past few hours, although it looks like the trend could reverse at any moment.

Litecoin Activates SegWit

Although several smaller altcoins have successfully implemented SegWit on their network over the past few weeks, Litecoin is the first major currency to do so. In this regard, the silver to Bitcoin’s gold has a competitive edge over its big brother. Then again, Litecoin never had full network blocks to deal with. However, a transaction malleability fix is always welcome, especially during these times of more money pouring into cryptocurrency as a whole.

As a result of this successful activation, Litecoin price started to grow exponentially. Many people feel this “pump” should not have taken place, as we all knew SegWit was going to activate within a specific timeframe. After all, the mining pools got together to pledge SegWit support, effectively locking in the activation threshold.

In the world of cryptocurrency, a steep value increase is often met with profit-taking, once things start to get rolling. It appears the same is happening to Litecoin right now, as the price briefly surged to 0.022 BTC. Everyone knew that price point would not be sustainable, and the following sell-off pushed the price back down to the 0.021 mark. It remains to be seen if a further reversal of the price gains will occur, although markets are seemingly stabilizing a bit.

Overall, Litecoin is seeing a tremendous influx of trading volume due to the activation of Segregated Witness. It is now second in volume, right behind XRP. If this trend keeps up for a few more hours, Litecoin will overtake XRP for today, though. Interestingly enough, there is about half as much buy support for Litecoin compared to XRP right now, which could hint at some other upcoming market movements.

All of this goes to show activating Segregated Witness is about much more than just raising the block size limit. While that latter part is very important to Bitcoin right now, the transaction malleability fix will help the network become more stable as well. Bitcoin’s price has increased gradually these past few weeks, and implementing SegWit could send the value up even further.

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