Bitcoin Core’s transaction malleability fix and scaling solution Segregated Witness (SegWit) was activated on Litecoin last week. Since then, Litecoin price massively increased at an exponential rate, due to rising interest from investors and traders.
On May 4, Litecoin briefly accounted for 22 percent of total daily cryptocurrency trading volume, hugely distancing itself from Ethereum. At the time or reporting, Litecoin still remains as the second most traded cryptocurrency in the market, at 15.31 percent of the global cryptocurrency exchange volume.
Major price factors
Two major driving factors of the recent surge in Litecoin price and market cap have been the activation of SegWit and the integration of Litecoin trading support by Coinbase.
As reported by Cointelegraph on May 4, Litecoin founder Charle Lee, who also operates as the director of engineering at Coinbase, convinced the US-based trading platform to support Litecoin amid rising interest from investors.
Upon the integration of Litecoin support by the Coinbase development team, Litecoin trading exploded on many exchanges including Coinbase’s digital currency exchange GDAX. In fact, over the past 24 hours, more than one mln Litecoins have been traded on GDAX.
More importantly, the rising trading volumes of Litecoin demonstrates the anticipation of the community over the implementation of SegWit. As some major Bitcoin mining pool operators including F2Pool’s Wang Chun previously expressed their willingness to adopt and embrace SegWit once it is successfully implemented on Litecoin, the entire cryptocurrency community has been optimistic toward Litecoin’s developmental approach and scaling roadmap.
In a month, the market cap of Litecoin increased from $400 mln to $1.27 bln. That is more than a three times increase in market cap and price within a span of 30 days. Investors and traders of Litecoin are closely following and analyzing the effect of SegWit on Litecoin.