- Highly anticipated Litecoin halving which precedes the Bitcoin halving is now just a couple of hours away.
- Investors remain optimistic that the ‘digital silver’ will record massive gains after an underwhelming performance thus far.
Litecoin investors remain underwhelmed with the price performance of LTC. The network is scheduled to undergo its fourth reward halving in a few hours, a highly anticipated event in the community. Although the community has been expressing positive sentiment, celebrating what will be the third successful halving, its native token LTC is under pressure.
On-chain data shows that LTC is under heavy selling pressure primarily from whales. Lauded just a few weeks ago by retail investors for their heavy accumulation that drove prices higher, whales have now been blamed for restraining prices as they cash out.
Despite this, the Litecoin network is showing strength with increased activity. LunarCrush, which shares social media insights, has reported that Litecoin social engagement has spiked to 2.16 million. This is a clear illustration of the interest surrounding the altcoin that is largely regarded as digital silver.
🚀 Litecoin activity is leading the market right now.
📊An analysis…
1⃣ A major social engagement spike to 2.16M social engagements within one hour occurred. This measures the depth of activity around social posts. Things like retweets, comments, etc. are included here to… pic.twitter.com/GY6qCLVR9S
— LunarCrush (@LunarCrush) July 30, 2023
With the upcoming halving, the mining reward is set to be slashed by half, changing from the current 12.5 LTC to 6.25 LTC. In principle, this is designed to control and limit the supply, driving demand higher. This characteristic is not identical to Bitcoin by coincidence but because Litecoin is a clone of Bitcoin which is widely regarded as digital gold. However, Litecoin boasts of faster transactions and producing more coins than Bitcoin.
Owing to these advantages, Litecoin has in the last 12 years risen to become the second-highest asset after Bitcoin for online shopping, followed by USDT and Ethereum (ETH).
With investor sentiments still high, LTC trading volume has witnessed a spike, rising by 38 percent in the last 24 hours. Exchanging for $91, its price has seen a marginal change of less than 1 percent at the same time. However, the token price has gained around 33 percent in 2023.
Charlie Lee’s Litecoin (LTC) Price Expectation
Litecoin founder Charlie Lee who has been speaking about the halving stated that the event helps achieve mass adoption without sacrificing network security. Speaking about price expectations, after affirming that price is driven by demand, he noted that a lot of the price action is a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’.
Just because people think the halving is going to cause the price to go up, they will buy ahead of the halving or even right after the halving.
For bitcoin and litecoin, sometimes the price went up before, sometimes it runs up afterwards,
With confidence high, LTC investors will look to break above the local resistance of $100 at the time of halving. From here, market sentiment and behavior of whale addresses will likely dictate whether prices will continue rising or investors will drag it down as they cash in profits.
