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For two days now, Litecoin has not been able to recover above $90.00 (range limit). However, the downside is strongly supported at the range support ($80.00).
The former Goldman Sachs partner and the founder and CEO of Galaxy Digital, Michael Novogratz recently said: “I don’t get this” Litecoin rally. He advised investors to sell LTC and buy BTC. His comments came after Litecoin rallied towards $100:
“Gold has an $8.5 trillion dollar market cap. Silver is $15bn That is .17%. $BTC has a $90bn mkt cap. $ltc is $5.7bn which is 6.4% of $BTC. Silver is at least useful for industrial production. $ltc is a glorified test net for $btc. I don’t get this rally. Sell $ltc buy $btc.”
Twitter user, Jon Moore, responded to Novogratz saying:
“Like most rich out of touch Billionaires you have No clue about the use case for payments. LTC is much cheaper to send, 4 times faster than BTC and is also compatible with Lightning Network. People actually use LTC dude!!”
What’s surprising is that it took Novogratz so long to rail against Litecon. After all, Litecoin’s price rally started well before Bitcoin broke out in recent days.
The LTC price has been on a tear since year-end 2018, over which time it has rocketed by approximately 150%. That’s about when the coin’s creator Charlie Lee revealed his interest in integrating privacy features into the cryptocurrency, giving Litecoin the chance to forge its own identity.
While Novogratz sees no value in Litecoin beyond being a testnet for Bitcoin (which some argue is quite valuable), the altcoin has locked down several high-profile marketing partnerships in the last few weeks.
Namely, Litecoin recently partnered with both Glory Kickboxing, the world’s premier kickboxing organization, and K-pop concert production company, C&U Entertainment Global, to promote Litecoin at the upcoming Feel the K-Pop concert.
Litecoin creator Charlie Lee has often said that if Bitcoin is digital gold, then Litecoin should be considered as digital silver. For example, this is a tweet sent out by Lee in May 2017:
Solution: silver to bitcoin’s gold
— Charlie Lee [LTC⚡] (@SatoshiLite) May 15, 2017
What Lee says makes sense since the two cryptocurrencies share the same basic philosophy, but Bitcoin is much harder (i.e. more expensive) to mine.
Novogratz’s use of the words “glorified test net” seems to suggest that he has been influenced by Tushar Jain, a managing partner at crypto hedge fund MultiCoin Capital Management.
As CryptoGlobe reported, back on 14 September 2018, Jain published a blog post titled “Debunking Market Narratives: Litecoin ($LTC) Edition” that claimed that the most popular narratives used for defending Litecoin all seem inaccurate, and called LTC (even at around $50) “significantly overvalued.”
In that blog post, Jain said that he believed that Litecoin is “a relic of the pre-smart contract platform crypto ecosystem,” that its fundamental value is a lot less than its current price (around $50 when the report was written), and that the only things propping up its price are “outdated narratives.”
It looks like Jain’s feelings about Litecoin have not changed since the day after Novogratz’s tweet, Jain sent out the following tweet:
Litecoin isn’t the silver to Bitcoin’s gold.
Litecoin is the fools’ gold. https://t.co/bmfwYAfRi4
— Tushar Jain (@TusharJain_) April 4, 2019
However, not everyone agrees with Novogratz’s assessment of Litecoin. One notable example is Mati Greenspan, Senior Market Analyst at social trading platform eToro, who sent out the following tweet to defend Litecoin:
LTC is literally silver to bitcoin’s gold. It’s far more useful for transactions as it’s cheaper and faster than BTC.
Feel free to review our in depth research paper: https://t.co/tk2Q1lxFve
— Mati Greenspan (@MatiGreenspan) April 3, 2019
The truth is, Bitcoin has a dominance factor of more than 50%. It will always be the first cryptocurrency and it isn’t going anywhere. Nonetheless, the network has been plagued by transactions that move at a snail’s pace and hefty fees attached. As a result, it has become more popular as a store of value versus a currency, something that the Lightning Network stands to change.
Litecoin, meanwhile, has been able to capitalize on those inefficiencies with block times of two-and-a-half minutes versus bitcoin’s 10 minutes, as per eToro research. This makes Litecoin more conducive to micro-transactions such as purchasing a daily cup of coffee, which is needed for wide-scale adoption.
Bear in mind that Litecoin’s price has doubled in the first three months of 2019 to register its best first-quarter performance on record.
The fourth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization is currently trading at $61, representing a 100 percent gain on January’s opening price of $30. It clocked a six-month high of $64.20 earlier this month.
