- The increased network traffic led to an uptick in the coin’s hash rate over the past few weeks.
- LTC crashed below $90, leading to long liquidations worth $1.65 million in the last 24 hours.
Litecoin’s [LTC] widely anticipated halving event is a little over two months away, which will be its third after 2015 and 2019. The excitement surrounding the event began to build, and on-chain transaction activity has gradually increased, indicating that big players were beginning to jump in on their LTC investments.
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Crypto Analyst Ali Martinez took to Twitter to draw attention to a major milestone in the proof-of-work (PoW) network.
Martinez noted that over 832,000 active wallets were interacting on the chain as senders and recipients, a level not seen in the 12-year history of Litecoin, popularly known as the “silver to Bitcoin’s gold.”
#Litecoin recently saw the largest spike in active addresses, where more than 832,000 $LTC addresses were interacting in the network as senders or receivers. pic.twitter.com/jPJ8ilTBsz
— Ali (@ali_charts) May 23, 2023
‘Lite’ hits the roof
LTC has been on a tear ever since users bogged down by rising transaction fees on the Bitcoin [BTC] network, chose to shift towards less expensive alternatives.
The other driving force behind Litecoin’s increasing network traffic was the introduction of LTC-20 token standard. This is a fork from the BRC-20 standard on which Bitcoin Ordinals NFTs are based.
The increased network traffic also led to an uptick in the coin’s hash rate over the past few weeks.
According to Coinwarz, the hash rate hit 778.5 TH/s on 18 May, just below the ATH of 785 TH/s. A growing hash rate is indicative of the computational power of miners to secure the network.
Source: Coinwarz
HODling increases
A look at the Age Consumed metric, which tracks movement of previously idle tokens, revealed that most holders continued to hold their tokens, underscoring the confidence in long-term potential of Litecoin.
The spurt in addresses was primarily driven by retail investors who created miniature sets of wallets to transact LTC-20 tokens.
Wallets holding between 0-0.01 LTC surged dramatically, rising to nearly 6 million at the time of writing, data from Santiment revealed.
Source: Santiment
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LTC drops below $90
At the time of writing, LTC exchanged hands at $88.09, recording a sharp drop of 5.5% in the 24-hour period, data from CoinMarketCap showed. The latest plunge reversed some of the previous week’s gains.
As a result of the crash, long positions worth $1.65 million were liquidated in the last 24 hours, data from Coinglass showed.
Moreover, the Open Interest (OI) in LTC futures plummeted nearly 6% to $402.85 million. However, on a broader note, the OI surged by 16% on a month-to-date (MTD) basis.
Source: Coinglass
