Litecoin (LTC) is currently trading at around $39 after a 12% drop in price since last week.

However, despite the overall downtrend, LTC price has risen by 5% during the past 24 hours.

Litecoin experienced exponential growth earlier this year. Prior to mid-June, the altcoin was the best performing digital asset of 2019, growing more than 170% in fewer than 90 days and peaking at around $145.

A serious summer downtrend then saw LTC tumble to around $49 before a market-wide pump last month following Chinese President Xi Jinping’s bullish comments on blockchain.

However, at the time of writing, LTC seems to be in bad shape after a massive drop down to $44 from $60 last month and a further decline down to $39 over December.

Will the altcoin recover and push above $50? Let’s take a look at the LTC chart, courtesy of TradingView.

Looking at the EMAs, the trend is looking grim. All of Litecoin’s EMAs have crossed to the downside and price action has been sloping downwards since the summer.

This is a clear sign of weakness, especially as LTC is now trading below a key resistance level around $55-$57 (according to the volume profile on the left).

Last week, I mentioned I could not foresee the price of LTC making a substantial move without first pumping above $50. In addition, volume really needs to see some growth.

At the moment, volume is sitting close to $3.7 billion – 28% above last week – thanks to the increase in buy and sell pressure over the last couple of days.

Finally, if the altcoin defies the odds and recovers, Litecoin will likely face some resistance between the 200-day and 20-day EMAs. In terms of price action, that translates into resistance from around $50 until $65.

I’ve shifted my position over the long term and I now believe it may take longer for a pump towards $100 to take place. It’s much more likely that the next significant pump will only happen after the BTC halving, which is taking place sometime in May 2020.

Litecoin updates

Recently, the “Magical Crypto Friends” show – which is available on YouTube and features Litecoin founder Charlie Lee – discussed the recent Litecoin Summit 2019.

The show covered the most important discussions in the community. From Litecoin acting as a store of value to new development updates.

Lee confirmed that the project is working on privacy improvements as well. The Litecoin development team is working with the Mimblewimble protocol, specifically the developers behind Grim, with a view to potentially adding the privacy protocol as an extension block.

According to Lee, it would work as follows:

“We’re working with the Grim++ developers to add an implementation of Mimblewimble. It adds an extension block to the Litecoin main-chain. You can transact between chains to use enhanced privacy.”

The goal would be to give Litecoin users improved privacy features when transacting.

About Litecoin

Litecoin was released in October 2011 by Charlie Lee, a former Google employee. It is a fork of Bitcoin, with the main difference being a smaller block generation time. The protocol also increased the maximum number of coins and implemented a different script-based algorithm.

Litecoin is one of the leading cryptocurrencies and is one of the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalisation.

More Litecoin news and information

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