Investing in the crypto area is a challenge. But there are the digital assets with lower risk and those with higher risk. In the first category, you will find Litecoin (LTC), a cryptocurrency that has been on the market for more than 7 years.

Litecoin is the second launched cryptocurrency (after Bitcoin), it is an open-source project and a fully decentralized global payment network. The main goal of this cryptocurrency is to facilitate payment transaction in terms of location, time and fees. Actually, you can say Litecoin is pretty much the same with Bitcoin.

1// Litecoin is very similar to Bitcoin

As Visa and PayPal are both used for payments, but they have specific features, so are Bitcoin and Litecoin. Actually, Litecoin wanted to be similar to silver, as long as Bitcoin was the gold of digital assets.

The main differences between these 2 cryptocurrencies refer to:

• the mathematical algorithm behind them (SHA-256 for Bitcoin and Scrypt for Litecoin);
• the process time of a block (the Litecoin network was designed to be faster);
• transaction time (Litecoin is faster);
• coin supply (Litecoin has 4 times more coins than Bitcoin);
• block reward (in mining, Litecoin is more offering).

2// Litecoin Price History

Litecoin first recordings on CoinMarketCap are from Spring 2013. Back then, the price for one coin was around $3, with small variations. The same year, in November, Litecoin price went up to $50.27. It followed the trend of Bitcoin which, for the first time in its history, has passed the $1,000 threshold.

After December 2013, when the crypto market had its highest peak of the time, the price of Litecoin has fallen down for a long period. For example, in May 2015 you could buy 1 LTC for as little as $1.45. Until April 2017, the value of this coin has varied, but it rarely exceeded $5.

From April 2017, the price of Litecoin started to rise, as the crypto market became more widely known. More exchanged were opened and people from all over the world were seeing the real potential of cryptocurrencies. In this context, in September 2017 Litecoin reached a new peak, being estimated a little over $80. For the next 2 months the price went almost 50% down, then the crypto market touched its highest prices in history. On the 19th of December, 2017, you could trade 1 LTC for $ 365.11, its price growing 100 times compared to the same period of the previous year.

For the next few weeks, Litecoin kept the price up, as all the crypto market went mad. Then, the price went down, hitting the lowest threshold of $23.04 in December 2018.

At the moment of writing this article (13th of March, 2019) you could buy and sell Litecoin at around $57.

3// Litecoin Price Prediction

As you could see from the history above, the difference between the current price of Litecoin ($57) and its all times price ($365) is quite big. This results in a GF (gain favor) of 6.4. So, if you invest today $1,000 in LTC, you can expect to make around $6,400 when the market will rise again. If you want to set more realistic expectations, you can think about selling at half the gain favor, meaning 3.2 times gains.

In other words, if you buy Litecoin (LTC) today and you sell when it hits the $183 threshold price, you will triple your investment.

As mentioned in this article, when investing in cryptocurrencies, you have to set realistic gain expectations. The digital assets market is volatile and you can easily lose your money. Or result in good gains if you choose the right approach. Thinking about half the gain favor is achievable. And, of course, you need patience.

Compared to Bitcoin

On the other hand, the prices of cryptocurrencies are far from stable. The more they will be adopted, the better their price will stabilize. Until that point, people may dream about Bitcoin hitting $100k or $1M. If Bitcoin reaches those prices, Litecoin will certainly follow, as always until now.

Of course, proportions will be kept. This means that if Bitcoin is $100k, the price for 1 LTC will be around $1,500. If you keep the rates, for 1 BTC = $500k, 1 LTC = $7.5k.

Now, do you believe the prices will go that high?

4// Buying Litecoin with Fiat is simple.

Litecoin is the third largest known digital assets in terms of fiat-cryptocurrencies exchanges. Nowadays, almost every exchange platform (that offers other digital assets besides Bitcoin) has Litecoin. I could find it almost everywhere while looking for Coinbase alternatives.

If you would ask about some crypto-fiat exchange service providers that offer LTC/USD, LTC/EUR or LTC/GPB markets, I would name:

• Coinbase;
• Changelly;
• Revolut;
• Covesting;
• Kraken;
• Binance;
• Coincorner;
• Coinvertit;
• Bittrex.

5// Litecoin and The Evolution of the Crypto Market

Did you know that there have been many exchanges offering Litecoin markets? This is, probably, because this coin appeared at the beginning of the crypto market and people trusted it almost as much as they did with Bitcoin. Actually, as mentioned above, Bitcoin and Litecoin are a sort of Visa and PayPal.

Because the market has evolved, there have appeared new coins that changed the vision a little bit. For example, Ethereum was created for smart contracts, not as a new payment method. Precisely because of that, it became the second largest know digital asset. Xrp has also some different features that have enriched the concept of blockchain applied in the financial world.

Despite all that, Litecoin remained an important digital asset, ranking number 4 on CoinMarketCap in March 2019.

6// Exchanges with Litecoin Markets

With all these changes over the years, many exchange platforms didn't bother to provide Litecoin markets anymore. Despite this fact, you can still find no less than 23 LTC markets on Coinexchange. If you ever look for some very little know cryptocurrencies, there is a great chance to find them tradable, at a real price, on this exchange.

The same was true with Cryptopia. At the moment of writing this article, this exchange still had some markets offline. In January 2019, Cryptopia suffered a major hack and they are still trying to recover after this incident.

If it gets back up, you might like to know that it also has more than 300 Litecoin markets. This basically means that there are many little-known digital assets that you can buy in exchange for Litecoin. I remind you that little know cryptocurrencies have a big gain potential (maybe more than 100 times the invested amount), but they also have higher risks. If you want to invest in altcoins, I invite you to take into consideration these criteria.

As a matter of fact, I am a hunter of little-know cryptocurrencies, although I don't invest a great amount of money in them. It happened to me several times to find the cryptocurrencies I was looking for on the Litecoin markets on either Cryptopia or Coinexchange.

How does a Litecoin market make the difference?

Take into consideration that the LTC markets are more suitable for digital assets that are under 1 Satoshi. They really make a price difference in those cases.

For example, if you ever want to buy Experience Points coins (XP), you should buy them from either a Litecoin, either a Dogecoin market. If you buy them in exchange for Bitcoin, you will pay a much higher price. At the moment of writing this article, on CoinMarketCap 1XP was estimated at $0.000006. And 1 Satoshi is $0.000039.

So, if you buy Experience Points from a BTC/XP market, you will pay $0.000039 for each XP, as you cannot pay less than 1 Satoshi/coin. But if you buy from an LTC/XP market, you will pay $0.000006 for every XP. That is more than 6 times lower.

Could you speculate that?

Of course, you might think about speculating this situation: you could buy XP on the LTC market, and sell it on the BTC market. This means you would sell XP for a price 6 times higher. And that can be done right now.

Actually, things don't stay precisely this way. Theoretically, you can do it. Practically, there are not a lot of people to get fooled. The liquidity of this type of coins on Bitcoin markets is super low. This means that there is (almost) no one to buy XP in exchange for Bitcoin. So, there are very low chances to actually close this type of trades.

7// Litecoin Wallets

As you could probably tell by now, such a largely known cryptocurrency could not be omitted by crypto wallet developers. So, besides the official Litecoin wallet, most of the trusted multi-currency wallets support Litecoin, both cold wallets, and hot wallets. Among those, I shall name:

• Nano Ledger;
• Trezor;
• KeepKey;
• Jaxx;
• Exodus;
• Coinomi;
• Ethos;
• Coinbase wallet;
• Edge.

Final Thoughts

As we can see, Litecoin is an alternative for Bitcoin in terms of aims and utility, with advantages and disadvantages. Although Litecoin is faster, Bitcoin remains the most trusted cryptocurrency.

And because at these times digital assets are based on people's trust, the price for each coin is not stable yet. When we highly adopt them in our everyday life, we will clearly define their purposes and values. Until then, the crypto market remains under the big question: is it the newest economical bubble? So take into consideration all aspects before investing in Litecoin or any other cryptocurrency.

Disclaimer. This article can also be found on Crypto Land website that I have a collaboration with.