The greatly anticipated Litecoin halvening event occurred this month, in which the block reward distributed to participating miners has been halved from 25 LTC to 12.5 LTC. An event which triggered after the blockchain network exceeded a trigger block height of 168,000 on Monday August 5th, 2019.
Top News
Welcome to our bi-weekly roundup of the most discussion-worthy news content related to the Litecoin blockchain network, the halvening, plus a brief look at periodical price movements.
August 5th
Litecoin Halvening
Before the Litecoin Halvening (January 1st – August 4th 2019)
Whilst speculation led many to believe that the Litecoin (LTC) token value would sky-rocket pre-halvening, along with the market cap: the reality is a little more complicated…
If we look at the prices and market cap for Litecoin LTC throughout the year, up until the halvening event, we can observe a constant rise in value leading right up until June 22, 2019 – after which it exhibited predominantly negative volatility. The market has yet to fully recover from the movements in this period.
Charlie Lee offered his own commentary to coincide with the Litecoin halvening event, coming in the form of a series of messages posted to his official Twitter account. Despite mixed signals from the market, Charlie Lee, creator of Litecoin, proclaimed (on August 5, 2019) the halvening a success, before proclaiming,
“Let’s do this again in August 2023! ?”
Pre-halvening Fall (June 23rd – August 4th 2019)
Day of Halvening (August 5th – 6th 2019)
After the Halvening (August 5th – 11th 2019)
Key Dates and volumes
- Pre Halvening High in 2019: June 22nd 19:14 UTC+1 | Market Cap $8,951,204,271 | US$143.58 | BTC0.01342039 | 24hr volume $5,354,426,730
- All Year Low, Pre Halvening 2019: July 16th 20:19 UTC+1 | Market Cap $4,949,544,797 | US$78.95 | BTC0.00816823 | 24hr volume $3,450,672,455
- Day before halvening: August 4th 2:19AM UTC+1 | Market Cap $5,973,055,972 | US$94.88 | BTC0.00873661 | 24hr volume $2,476,415,375
- Lowest trade value in USD, post-halvening: August 10th 14:19 UTC +1 | Market Cap $5,290,185,337 | US$83.96 | BTC0.00732096 | 24hr volume $3,067,964,163
More Stories
August 3rd
Litecoin Foundation Creates New Unique Wallet, For Discrete Donations & New Developments
Litecoin Foundation has announced that it has established a new LTC wallet, with the express intent for it to be used “exclusively” for the purpose of depositing contributions towards development on the Litecoin platform.
Its team claims that the establishment of this unique new address is “part of a commitment to ensuring the evolution of the technology that underpins Litecoin” before promising that the team will “keep [the community] updated on the progress of this wallet as well as the roadmap for these developments.”.
Address: MQeMWvsEB74AEYJ32W2pHJ3fM4aWJjpeLs
The Litecoin Foundation is a non profit organization, registered in Singapore. Its managing director is Charlie Lee, co-founder of Litecoin – and it is comprised of a team which shares a “mission of advancing Litecoin for the good of society”.
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August 8th
Litecoin Advert Displayed at Miami Dolphins Game, Following Strategic Partnership
Miami Dolphins, The NFL team, has reportedly broadcast its first recorded instance of Litecoin focused advertising. It follows a strategic partnership that was announced back in July 2019 between the team and Litecoin.
This advert was said to have been shown at a Miami Dolphins home game, in which the team won 34 – 27 in a match against the visiting Atlanta Falcons at the Hard Rock Stadium. It occurred on August 8th, 2019.
It also comes after a prior sponsorship from Litecoin of the UFC 232 heavyweight title fight between Jon Jones and Alexander Gustafsson.
Hard Rock Stadium has an approximate capacity of 65,326.
Other prominent examples of cryptocurrencies intermingling with the world of sports include the Sacramento Kings, which was the first professional sports team to accept Bitcoin as a means of payment.
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August 9th
Binance identifies Litecoin dusting attacks, just one day after launching LTC margin trading
In a tweet message dated August 9th, 2019 – Binance stated that it had identified what it described as a “large scale dusting attack” which affected a number of its customers holding LTC / Litecoin balance.
Curiously, the attack took place the day after the exchange had announced the launch of margin trading services for Tether (USDT), Litecoin (LTC), and Ethereum Classic (ETC). Following this, blockchain data provider Glassnode took to Twitter to explain that it determined 294,582 addresses had been affected by the attack.
Dusting attacks are when a perpetrator sends its target a large quantity of transactions, often for miniscule values of cryptocurrency. The purpose of this activity is to determine the identities of potential victims, behind their addresses on a public / decentralized blockchain – even if they may have used ‘tumbling’ services in an attempt to mask this information.
Like most all exchanges, Binance is no stranger to hacks or other malicious targeted attacks.
Many exchanges at present attempt to remedy this by keeping a reserve fund specifically for the purpose of compensating customers in the event of a successful attack.
August 10rd
Charlie Lee Puts Foot In Mouth Over Tweet Storm
Charlie Lee posted a much publicized 15-message long series of tweets recently, in which he publicly stated that “Only a handful of core developers working on Litecoin Core”.
Lee cites what he sees as a public skepticism towards the development progression for Litecoin, and attempts to excuse it.
Firstly, he claims that although the majority of work undertaken was not viewable on the official GitHub page for Litecoin, this is because it was being hosted on the page of the head developer for Litecoin Core: Adrian Gallagher (AKA thrasher).
This doesn’t sound like a poor excuse at first, however doubts are raised when he continues to deliver additional unnecessary excuses. Lee adds that there are two more reasons that it may appear that little development has taken place.
” Litecoin releases lag Bitcoin releases by a few months. So when we do a release, we are releasing code that’s been released in Bitcoin months ago.
“We don’t work on the master branch of the main project. It’s generally not good dev practice to check in non-release code into the master branch. This is because if someone builds from source from master branch, they might get a broken build and that’s bad.”
Near the end, Charlie Lee calls the negative speculation on the progress of Litecoin development “FUD” – before promising to personally address questions surrounding progress on MimbleWimble (MW) and Confidential Transactions (CT).
Lee states that the projects are progressing according to schedule – and reminds readers that the original update ETA stated “sometime 2019”.
By the end it reads as if he is digging an increasingly large hole for himself, adding apologetic statements which – whilst not explicitly – suggest admittance of fault.
“That said, I believe it’s time now for me to shift focus from adoption back to development. I still think fungibility is extremely important and I will get the ball rolling on MW/CT again. This time, I won’t make any promises on dates. ?
“Last thing I want to add is that I will work on better communication with the community and give more frequent updates on things.”
Price Movements
Information correct as of 01:35 AM (GMT+1), 24th August 2019
