Litecoin Sets A High Record of About 1,400 percent

Litecoin, which is the 5th-largest cryptocurrency, hits a high record of $64.2 making about 1383% rise since 1st of January when it traded at $4.33 as seen on coinmarketcap.com. Recently today, it pulled back to about $62 and a bit above in early trade.

Earlier this year, a segregrated witness (Segwit) upgrade was activated on the litecoin network which essentially increased its capacity and transaction speed which was thesame process that happened on bitcoin network few weeks back. The lightening network technology is now being looked forward to by the community which is believed will speed up transaction processes and also make it easy to integrate several digital coins.

Charlie Lee, the creator of Litecoin who was a former Google employee that began the Litecoin project in 2011, explained that he sees the cryptocurrency as being a key player in payments, whereas bitcoin will be more a store of value. He stated this in an interview with blogger Crypto Hedge, which was posted on YouTube on Monday that;

Bitcoin will always be the gold standard because bitcoin will have the strongest network, the most secure, the most money mining it. Litecoin will be second to that and bitcoin being the most secure will obviously cost more … Litecoin transaction will cost less. So Litecoin will provide a niche where it will be more used for payment whereas bitcoin will be more used for storing.

Compared to a limited supply of 21 million bitcoin, Litecoin has a limited supply of 84 million litecoins.Currently, litecoin transactions take just over 2 minutes to go through compared to about 100 minutes for bitcoin.

According to CNBC, on Tuesday morning, 36.9 percent of litecoin purchase happened in Chinese yuan, followed by 22.4 percent in Korean won. So far, in South Korea, the authorities have been looking at ways to regulate digital currencies, which is believed to be buoying the market. The head of Marketing at cryptocurrency exchange Gatecoin, told CNBC that;

Regulation will bring an aura of legitimacy to the country's burgeoning speculative cryptocurrency market and will encourage more participation from individual and institutional investors

With the current situation with litecoin, it seems current cryptocurrency investors are looking to diversify which is seen from the 18% of litecoin purchase that happened in Bitcoin.

According to Lee, he believes that with Lightning network … users wouldn't need to hold all the coins, but instead just hold all their money in bitcoin or litecoin, and if there is an application that requires ether or some other token, they can easily … convert it on the fly to the token that they need.

What are your thoughts on all these?