Since early November, the price of Litecoin ($LTC) has increased by about 90%, with the advance being aided by so-called Litecoin’sharks,’ or huge addresses that have been heavily acquiring the cryptocurrency.
According to Santiment, an on-chain analytics startup, addresses holding between 100 and 10,000 $LTC, or between $9,470 and $947,000 at the time of writing, had accumulated 1.15 million – more than $100 million – coins in the previous six months.
According to the business, approximately 0.5% of the cryptocurrency’s supply has been added to these addresses in the last seven weeks. One expert expects Litecoin, a cryptocurrency sometimes referred to as the silver to Bitcoin’s gold, will continue surging and reach a new all-time high next year.
Litecoin “trends to rally quite strongly before its halving,” according to data analyzed by famous cryptocurrency analyst Rekt Capital, with the cryptocurrency rising 820% after bottoming out 122 days ahead of its first-ever increasing 550% after bottoming out 243 days ahead of its second halving.
Historically, the cryptocurrency has performed better following its halving event. For example, LTC increased by 12,400% after the first halving and 1,573% after the second. The halving of Litecoin is scheduled for August 2023.
According to CryptoGlobe, LTC’s usage has exploded to the point that the total number of addresses on the network has overtaken the total number of talks on Ethereum ($ETH).
It’s worth mentioning that the measure “total addresses” employed by on-chain analytics firm Glassnode indicates the number of different addresses that have participated in any transaction (as sender or recipient) on the blockchain network since its creation till today.
An address on a public blockchain, such as the one used by Litecoin, is a unique identifier that allows users to send and receive transactions. Still, it does not reflect a single user because a person may generate several addresses for free. As a result, some privacy advocates recommend that consumers generate a new address for each transaction.
The rapid increase in addresses comes as Litecoin’s hash rate reaches a new all-time high of about 680 TH/s. Litecoin, like BTC, has a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus process but with a different hashing algorithm.
