Litecoin Price Skyrockets as Coinbase Adds LTC

On Wednesday, May 3, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges, Coinbase, announced that it was adding support for Litecoin.  The Litecoin price reacted immediately with a sharp rise in price from $16 to $21 to surpass a market cap of $1 billion.  

The official announcement from Coinbase states: 

“Customers can now easily buy, sell, send, and store Litecoin via the Coinbase website or mobile apps. This is part of our shift to supporting more types of digital assets over the coming year”. 

Charlie Lee, the founder of Litecoin, commented to Coinidol that at the moment Coinbase has no plans to add direct exchange between BTC and LTC. For now, users willing to buy or sell Litecoin using Bitcoin must first exchange their BTC to fiat currency. 

David Cruz, Customer Operations at Coinbase said to Coinidol that they currently only offer crypto-to-crypto trading on GDAX exchange. "However, we do hope to add support for this to Coinbase in the future" he added.  

Luke Demi, Software Engineer at Coinbase also commented on the options of LTC/BTC trades:  

"You can use GDAX to easily trade LTC/BTC without leaving the Coinbase ecosystem. Gdax is a Coinbase brand. You log into Gdax using your Coinbase account."

Litecoin successes 

Litecoin’s success quest began in the beginning of 2017 when its founder Charlie Lee urged the Litecoin Mining community to support Segregated Witness. In April, just before SegWit adoption, Litecoin’s price had doubled from $4.30 to $9. 

Since the adoption of SegWit, Litecoin’s price has surged even faster and reached up to $16 per LTC by the end of April.   

Allison Coleman, Founder at a consulting company in the field of cryptocurrency, Axisflip Cryptofinancial, commented to Coinidol.com about the recent successes of LTC: 

“Litecoin implementing segregated witness has sparked a renewed interest in this cryptocurrency, and making Litecoin available on a popular exchange is an important development for continued growth. Many users will also interpret the offering of Litecoin as a kind of endorsement by a major exchange, which will have put considerable effort into choosing which cryptos among many to integrate into its services.
Any time a desired commodity is available to a fresh market of interested buyers, the price will react positively.” 

And now, finally, the creation of Charlie Lee hits the cryptocurrency exchange where he is currently working as the Director of Engineering. The announcement from Coinbase served even better to Litecoin and it has hit the top-4 most valuable cryptocurrencies. 

John MacPherson, Compliance Manager forr Wall of Coins, a P2P Bitcoin and Dash exchange by Genitrust, Inc. commented to Coinidol.com: 

"I think the support of Coinbase will be a positive thing for Litecoin. I believe it will boost the price of LTC over the next while. People have been waiting for a while for Coinbase to add LTC. Ever since Charlie started at Coinbase, the community has been awaiting LTC support there. The question is, will Coinbase add more support and liquidity to LTC than what Poloniex has done already? Or just another place to trade and gives arb opportunity. At this point, any market taking on a coin like Litecoin is a good thing, can do nothing but help the community. I wonder though, will it pump because of news, and the new market gives better distribution and have the price drop a bit eventually because of it?  That’s usually how it goes when a larger exchange adds a coin that has been pumped on a smaller exchange, but LTC has the potential to defy that." 

Marco Giovanni, former Head of Marketing at CoinsBank.com commented that the news from Coinbase would undoubtedly influence the price of Litecoin, due to more channels of trading and new features that Coinbase provides for its users: 

“Crucial event for the adoption of Bitcoin's "little brother". ” 

Simon Dixon, CEO of BnkToTheFuture.com, stated: 

“Litecoin seems to be fulfilling its original vision to become silver to Bitcoins Gold which never quite worked out until now. It has become a very useful tool in testing Bitcoin scaling proposals. The Litecoin community was very patient and being added to CoinBase is a very nice reward for them. I am sure this will give more volume to Litecoin even though it has been on many other exchanges for a long time now. This helps Litecoin adoption for newbies that want a slight Bitcoin hedge, but don't want to place bids and offers in exchange order books. It seems Litecoin has finally found its user case as Bitcoin testnet and still has a long chain of history with stable volume compared to other Altcoin's.

Aaron Foster, CEO and co-founder of the BitPoint P2P exchange and wallet, stated: 

"A listing on Coinbase is certainly a big deal for litecoin and today's price action shows. What is going to be far more significant is if lightning is implemented before Bitcoins saga is resolved. In that case I think we will see litecoin truly taking its place as silver to Bitcoins gold." 

Gavin Knight, analyst at TokenMarket, a marketplace for tokens, digital assets and blockchain based investing and COO of CredibleFriends.com, trust based p2p lending project, said to Coinidol: 

"Charlie Lee is a personality in cryptocurrency, and engages his community with humor but has a focus on continuing to improve litecoin. With Xinxi Wang and the Litecoin Association, they've come together to add Segwit and more in the future. Coinbase is great, and Charlie's involvement there makes it easier to get integrated. I think the Litecoin community and developers could have easily just abandoned the project a long time ago, but things are happening month to month, so the commitment from the team is what has pushed the price. I don't know of any longer running coins besides Bitcoin that have so many passionate contributors, but there are still some going strong."