Litecoin Sharks Were Behind $LTC’s Near 90% Surge, Data Suggests

The price of Litecoin ($LTC) has surged nearly 90% since early November, with the movement seemingly being supported by so-called Litecoin ‘sharks,’ or large addresses that have been heavily accumulating the cryptocurrency.

According to on-chain analytics firm Santiment, Litecoin’s rally was supported by addresses holdings between 100 and 10,000 $LTC, or between $9,470 and $947,000 at the time of writing, which have accumulated 1.15 million – over $100 million – coins in the last six months.

In the past seven weeks, the firm details, nearly 0.5% of the cryptocurrency’s supply was added to these addresses. Litecoin, a cryptocurrency that’s often referred to as the silver to Bitcoin’s gold, is notably expected by one analyst to keep on rallying to hit a new all-time high next year.

According to data analyzed by popular cryptocurrency analyst Rekt Capital, Litecoin “trends to rally quite strongly prior to its halving,” with the cryptocurrency rising 820% after bottoming out 122 days ahead of its first-ever halving, and rising 550% after bottoming 243 ahead of its second halving.

Historically, the cryptocurrency rallied more after its halving event. After its first halving, LTC surged 12,400%, while after its second halving, it rose 1,573%. Litecoin’s halving is set to occur in August 2023.

As CryptoGlobe reported, LTC has been seeing its adoption explode, to the point that the total number of addresses on the network has now surpassed the total number of addresses on Ethereum ($ETH).

The metric “total addresses” used by on-chain analytics firm Glassnode, it’s worth noting, represents the number of distinct addresses that have participated in any transaction (either as sender or receiver) on the blockchain network from its inception until now.

On a public blockchain like that of Litecoin, an address is a unique identifier that allows users to send and receive transactions., but does not represent a single user, as a user can create multiple addresses for free. Some privacy advocates advise users to create one address per each transaction.

Litecoin’s sharp rise in addresses comes at a time in which its hashrate hit a new all-time high of around 680 TH/s. Litecoin uses a Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus algorithm, just like BTC, but with a different hashing algorithm.

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