Between EOS above and Tether below, Litecoin is the 7th most valuable cryptocurrency in the world, by market cap. Along with the rest of the market, Litecoin prices got trashed in November 2018. They currently sit at just under $35 per coin.
Litecoin is nothing new at this point. The cryptocurrency forked from Bitcoin all the way back in 2011, and since has served to demo new Bitcoin features, pick up some of Bitcoin’s slack during the BTC network’s slowest days, and served as a fast and affordable cryptocurrency in its own right.
So what does the future hold for Litecoin LTC prices? Do today’s year lows represent a Litecoin buying opportunity, or is Litecoin due for even further price decline. We’ll look at several recent industry opinions to try to determine what the most likely possibilities are.
Industry Opinions About the Future of Litecoin
There are plenty of people talking about the future of LTC. Most of them don’t agree, but this doesn’t mean that they are all incorrect. Here are some of the most insightful and/or bombastic predictions about upcoming LTC price action.
- Multicoin’s Tushar Jain: LTC = “Significantly Overvalued Relic“. Ouch. Multicoin is a hedge fund, and Jain is a managing partner. In a detailed report, Jain identifies several major vulnerabilities for Litecoin, and anticipates that LTC prices will sink lower and lower in the near future. For one, LTC is no longer the cheapest coin (per unit) on Coinbase, a factor that made it popular among new investors. Furthermore, Bitmain owns more than 1 million LTC, a cache they may be dumping to boost Bitcoin Cash’s prospects. Finally, the Litecoin Foundation has only just over $300,000 in assets left, much of this tied up in LTC. This small financial runway may prevent meaningful development from occurring on Litecoin. Such a perfect storm might indeed keep Litecoin from soaring in a bull market, and could see it dropping out of the top 10 and into obscurity.
- Litecoin’s Charlie Lee: Litecoin has “Tremendous value“. In a tweetstorm from back in September, Charlie Lee laid out a passionate case for the inherent value of Litecoin. Citing Litecoin’s utility in Bitcoin’s Lightning Network, atomic swaps, strong community, and ongoing Litecoin development, Lee makes a case that Litecoin prices will boost greatly in a bull market. It’s possible in a case like this that LTC prices could hit new all-time highs.
- Autonomous Partner’s Arianna Simpson: Litecoin “has literally no reason to exist“. On the other side of the argument, we’ve got venture capitalist Arianna Simpson questioning Litecoin on the existential level. She posits that Litecoin can no longer claim a strong use case as a test net for Bitcoin, or as an onramp for the Lightning Network. She also claims that Charlie Lee’s conspicuous sale of his personal LTC when prices were at their height was an act of bad faith, one anticipating an eventual erosion of LTC’s value.
- TD Ameritrade regulated crypto exchange ErisX = Litecoin Futures. TD Ameritrade seems optimistic about the future of Litecoin, having added it as a futures option on their newly regulated crypto exchange, ErisX. Futures have played prominently in the Bitcoin story in 2018, and can serve as an onramp for institutional investors to get into the crypto space for the first time. If Litecoin proves a popular futures trading option, then this alone could see value added to the LTC price in the near-to-medium term.
So here we have four opinions: two optimistic and two pessimistic. To the optimists, Litecoin prices are likely about as low as we’re going to see anytime soon…perhaps ever. To the pessimists, Litecoin is a dinosaur in the blockchain space, one which can no longer make valid claims at unique and necessary use cases. There are other opinions out there as well. If you want to buy Litecoin, make sure to do your own research and create an opinion that makes sense to you!
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