While the crypto market is flooded with new coins and tokens every day (more than 20,000!), the old guard of PoW coins stands strong. Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Dogecoin are some of the veterans of the space and have gathered huge communities over their first decade of existence.
While it’s still hugely popular to convert Dogecoin to Bitcoin, Litecoin has taken a bit of a hit on its popularity and acts as a third wheel to this trio. However, only recently LTC entered a small bull run on itself, making 80% gains in the past couple of months.
This meant that the first altcoin is far from being unpopular, as many declared it to be. In this article, we take a look at the latest updates in the Litecoin protocol, its fundamentals, and upcoming halving. We also provide an LTC price prediction following some reputable sources from around the internet.
Litecoin Technology Overview
LTC is considered to be the first altcoin and was a fork from the original Bitcoin protocol. It was created with the goal to be a lighter, more nimble version of BTC, providing higher transaction speeds.
Originally, the Scrypt protocol upon which LTC runs was supposed to be more democratic than SHA-256. However, ASICs adapted to mine Scrypt coins, making Litecoin fail at this feature. Nevertheless, it quickly became popular as a payment cryptocurrency. It was used all over the world for sending money quickly and cheaply.
A fun fact is that the more popular Dogecoin is a fork of Litecoin and that DOGE can be mined as a side-product of LTC mining.
Even though Litecoin still runs on Proof of Work, its core development team has been working on releasing multiple crucial upgrades.
MWEB Upgrade
The MWEB upgrade is one of the most important updates to the Litecoin code since its inception. This update has been set in motion since March 2021 and was completed in May 2022. But what is MWEB, really?
MWEBstands for Mimblewimble Extension Blocks, which is an upgrade to the Litecoin protocol that increases fungibility and advanced privacy features. With governments further scrutinizing crypto, LTC has chosen the path of becoming an optional privacy coin, where users can obfuscate their transaction data from the public ledger.
While this has caused some exchanges in Korea and Australia to ban LTC, the coin has actually gained in both value and popularity since the upgrade.
Extension Blocks are used as a sidechain, a parallel Litecoin blockchain, increasing the privacy and scalability of the coin itself. Through MWEB, LTC devs aim to make the coin the ultimate payment cryptocurrency.
2023 LTC Halving
Another factor playing in Litecoin’s favor is the 2023 halving. Just like Bitcoin, LTC’s protocol undergoes a halving mechanism, where every four years, the mining rewards are cut by half. This means that in 2023, the block rewards will be reduced from 12.5 to 6.25 LTC.
While this halving doesn’t impact the entire market as Bitcoin does, it certainly plays a role in the supply control of LTC. As fewer LTC will be issued, the scarcity of the coin will increase, and so will its price over time.
LTC Price Prediction
Considering these important fundamental updates, we can conclude that analysts still have high hopes for Litecoin’s future.
For example, the priceprediction.net website provides a decently bullish target of $137.68 for 2023, nearly double its current price. Moreover, for 2025, the forecasts are even better, with targets over $288.78.
Digitalcoinprice.com paints a similar picture of the “silver to Bitcoin’s gold.” For 2023, price targets are around $176.10, whereas we should expect it to reach $310.57 by 2025.
This means that it might not be the right time to do an LTC to MATIC exchange just yet.
Conclusion
Litecoin is far from having said its last word in this market. With increased scrutiny from governments into the crypto space, we can definitely see LTC gaining popularity with its new privacy features.
It also still holds a lot of popularity with merchants and users as a payment currency. This makes it much more useful than 90% of the tokens in the crypto space.
