The Litecoin Cryptocurrency Research Report
Summary
Litecoin is a cryptocurrency that aims to solve one of the most basic applications in the blockchain industry: currency. Litecoin is a fork (software copy) of the Bitcoin blockchain that improves upon many features of the original chain. It is has faster transaction times and requires a smaller fee to complete the transfer. Led by prominent developer and ex-Coinbase Director of Engineering Charlee lee, Litecoin has become one of the more popular cryptos used for various payments in online shops and peer-to-peer transactions…at least for now.
I. General
1. Supply
56,674,023 LTC
2. Market cap:
$6,6B // $117.54
3. Marketcap class:
Very High
4. Industry:
Digital Currency
4. Type:
Currency
5. What Problem does it solve?
Peer-to-peer digital payments on a decentralized ledger.
6. Competitors
The competitors of Litecoin are all coins that position themselves as a currency within the market. The main ones are Bitcoin, DASH, Monero, ZCash, PIVX, Bitcoin Cash and Ripple. Litecoin offers some advantages to Bitcoin and has gained popularity in the crypto space. It is semi-tranparent like Bitcoin, as it exposes transactions associated with wallet adresses and does not offer any privacy features like ones Monero and DASH implement.
General Category Score
II. Online Presence
7. Domain name
The domain name is short and recognizable and tells people what it’s about: Litecoin – It’s a “lite” version of Bitcoin.
8. Design
The website looks professional but does not look captivating or intriguing.
9. Roadmap
Litecoin has progressed quite well on the roadmap, being one of the few currencies used in daily life without any major bugs or security issues in recent news. It has seen a widespread adoption within the cryptocommunity and the low fees provide a strong incentive to use it. At the moment there is no faster and cheaper way to transfer tokens between wallets and exchanges than using Litecoin, other than perhaps Dogecoin. What’s planned for the future? I have not been able to find a clear outline, but it seems that atomic swaps are a strong focus of their development efforts.
10. Branding
The brand sounds elegant. It has the word “coin” which identifies it imediatly as a cryptocurrency, and a “currency” that can be used for payments. It also contains the word “Lite” which hints that it is lightweight in comparison to Bitcoin and perhaps easy to use. Overall a good name.
11. Overall Impression
The website looks professional, but could be improved upon further by offering interactive content, more apparent links to social feeds and communities. Eye-catching animations go a long way and should be used to make the technology friendly and interesting for newcomers.
Branding Score
III. Technicals
12. Whitepaper
There is no Litecoin whitepaper.
Or at least I was not able to find one during my research. There is a Litecoin Wiki, that does not look very impressive but does answer the basic questions around mining and purchasing litecoin.
I guess the reasoning here is that Litecoin is a Bitcoin copy does not need a separate academic paper, you can just read the original Bitcoin whitepaper.
That means you are left with the open source code repository on github, which I appreciate, but a little more text and explanation for the less technical users would go a long way.
Typically, this is one of the most important steps in the research of a cryptocurrency. After all, the whitepaper is the primary source of information a company can be held accountable for. It is used to explain the technical implementation and innovation to users, academics & developers and pitch the project to investors.
However, given the wide acceptance and great reputation of Charlie Lee, his team of developers and the sheer fact that the code is public to everyone and the project actually works, and is used by thousands of users every day to make transactions, makes up for the lack of a dedicated whitepaper.
No deception found here, I have use litecoin myself many times and it is one of my prefered payment methods and I guess that is the best proof any cryptocurrency can provide.
13. Pre-mining
Only 150 premined coins (genesis block and the first two blocks). This is very positive, because it means that the Litecoin foundation truly cares about decentralization. In a recent news update, Charlie Lee had announced that he has sold all his stake in Litecoin to help him keep developing the project without any bias. It was a somewhat controversial move, I think it’s a positive move, but you can judge it for yourself.
14. Mining
A similar to Bitcoin, yet less resource intensive proof-of-work mining procedure.
Technicals Score
IV. Team
15. Collective
The team of Litecoin consists of an international team of developers around Charlie, who are experienced and confident in developing an innovative blockchain projects.
16. Flags
There are no team members who have a shady history.
17. Developers
The team looks very trustworthy even though it is a team of only 7 people, they have 504 contributors in GitHub.
18. Github
The code repository can be found in https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin
It has a huge amount of commits: 16,054.
19. Activity
Latest commit: 2 days ago. (Very active)
Developers Score
V. Community
20. Bitcoin Talk thread
Large and active Bitcointalk thread. You can find Charlie there under the alias coblee.
Link to Bitcointalk thread on Litecoin.
21. Facebook page
It seems that they do not have an official page. The litecoinnews page does not seem to be run by litecoin foundation members.
22. Twitter page
Present and active, 418K followers strong.
Link to Litecoin Twitter page
Charlie Lee’s Twitter is even stronger with 767K followers.
23. Slack & Reddit channel
Very active Litecoin SubReddit.
The Slack channel is for developers only.
There is also a dedicated forum: https://litecointalk.io/
24. Community activity
The Litecoin community goes back a long time and seems to be quite active. However I found the Litecoin foundation content somewhat lacking. Blogs and newsletters about upcoming projects and developments would be helpful. I surprised me to see that they don’t have an official facebook change, pehaps that was a decision they made early on.
Community Score
VI. Perception
25. Google search check
Mostly positive results and some updates around Charlie Lee’s Tweets.
26. Google sentiment
Lot’s of great articles and videos and many online shops that accept Litecoin as payment.
27. Youtube sentiment
Overall good support from Crypto influencers.
28. Community sentiment
Very bullish sentiment and amazing community engagement on all social channels.
29. Criminal activity
No criminal activity found.
Sentiment Score
VII. Product
30. State
Litecoin is one of the few projects in the crypto ecosystem that has an existing product that works and is used daily by a large number of users. Exciting updates on this project are the atomic swaps which allow decentralized “swapping” of altcoins to litecoin. A few successful atomic swap experiments have been performed by Charlie Lee.
31. Partnerships
We were no able to find any concise lists of partnerships, however there are well over a thousand online shops which accept Litecoin as payment online. It is easily integratable into WordPress, Woocommerce and Shopify websites.
32. Positive news
Partnerships with large online payment systemson the roadmap.
33. Negative news
No negative news so far other than the friendly rilvary banter from Bitcoin maximalists.
Product Score
VIII. Exchange Listings
You can purchase Litecoin on:
Which are very reputable and trustworthy exchanges. We recommend using binance for smaller exhcange fees, fast verification process and highly reliable interface.
Listing Score
VVI. Verdict
The Litecoin project has several positive drivers. One of them is the first mover advantage. The project dates back a few years and has built up long term trust and credibility and a significant marketcap along the way. Another advantage is that it actually works and is currently one of the most used tokens that are actually used for payments in this pre-mainstream era.
However, there are bearish indicators to consider too. Litecoin’s branding is weak. What is the unique selling point of this cryptocurrency? It is not apparent. Even on the homepage of the website it says that “Litecoin is a faster version of Bitcoin”. Unfortunately this is not enough, to position a coin in highly competative market. What happens when Bitcoin implements Lightning Networks? What advanteges will Litecoin have left? How will it be able to compete with payment industry tokens which offer privacy features like Monero, PIVX and DASH. These are all potential problems in the near and mid-term future of Litecoin.
In the long term, we see these issues becoming more and more apparent and project a declining marketcap growth and price trend.
2018 Is a year to see how Litecoin will hold up. Let’s find out together.
DASH
Disclaimer: This is not financial advice. Investing in cryptocurrency assets is a risky, do not invest funds you are dependent on.
