The “flappening” begins as Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash switch places

Charlie Lee is celebrating that Litecoin (LTC) has overtaken Bitcoin Cash (BCH) in terms of total market cap.

In recent weeks, the project has moved up the rankings all the way to seventh in terms of market cap. At the time of writing, Litecoin has a market cap dominance of 110% over Bitcoin Cash, but it’s in metrics like ‘active user addresses in 24 hours’ where Litecoin really shows its dominance, as Litecoin currently has four times as many as Bitcoin Cash.

In the last 24 hours alone, Litecoin had over 50,000 active addresses vs. the 13,000 for the winner of crypto’s latest forking war. It’s a significant lead given that BCH was an airdrop to the majority of crypto participants in June 2017, whereas Litecoin had to be mined or bought on a trading platform (typically for another cryptocurrency).

Charlie Lee had predicted a “flappening” back in February this year, but he probably never considered the potential for a fork. Since then, the ABC side of the fork has claimed the ticker and Bitcoin Cash brand.

Flappening watch

Litecoin fans have taken their leader’s prediction very seriously. Someone even created Flappening.watch, a website which analyses various metrics by which LTC can overtake BCH. The website watches market capital, price, number of active addresses, number of daily transactions, daily trading value, daily mining reward, and average block time.

By some metrics, Litecoin had always been ahead of Bitcoin Cash – it handled more transactions and higher volumes, while constantly discovering new blocks four times faster (which is a feature by design). In this way, LTC never lost its supremacy as the more liquid and convenient coin for transactions and payments.

Creating value in the LTC economy

Earlier this month, Coin Rivet brought you the story of how Charlie Lee had been using a combination of Litecoin and the Lightning Network to ‘instantly’ buy Amazon gift cards. It’s applications like this that add that extra level of interoperability between Litecoin and the wider Bitcoin-pegged and segwit-enabled ecosystem.

If you also look at fees, driven by recent network optimisations, transaction fees for Litecoin have reduced ten-fold. This reduction in fees could act as a boost to help adoption grow under the ‘medium of exchange’ use case, which has been a longstanding visionary statement for the open source cryptocurrency project.