Category: LTC

Five major South Korean exchanges announced their intentions to delist Litecoin (LTC). The cryptocurrency recently implemented an update to improve its privacy and scalability features.

Related Reading | Litecoin Reveals Rollout Date For MimbleWimble, Will LTC See Relief?

As a result, Upbit, Bithumb, Korbit, Gopax, and Coinone will stop offering to their customers. The update has made Litecoin incompatible with South Korean regulations.

In the official delisting announcement posted by Upbit, the platform claims the following trading pairs will be unavailable as soon as today, June 8th: LTC/KRW, LTC/BTC, and LTC/USDT. The core reason behind this decision, the exchange said, is:

(…) it is believed that the upgrade has been carried out with a selection function that does not expose transaction information.

The decision is guided, the post continued, by South Korea’s Specific Financial Information Act. This regulation demands exchange platforms to check a blockchain’s transaction for “transparency”.

In that way, Upbit and other South Korean exchanges can verify that the user or the transaction doesn’t violate the country’s anti-money laundering regulations. The rule is also aimed at preventing bad actors to obtain funds via illegal activities.

The South Korean exchanges claim the MimbleWimble update will provide the Litecoin network with these capabilities:

(LTC) has room to see the addition of technology that makes these transfer records unidentifiable, so we decided to designate it as a significant issue. So far, there have been no deposits made using the Mimblewimble function with Upbit, and we do not plan to reflect deposits in the future.

The MimbleWimble and Litecoin’s new privacy features seem to affect South Korean exchanges. However, privacy coins have been outcasted from major trading platforms over the past two years.

Monero (XMR), Zcash (ZEC), and others suffered from a similar decision taken by many exchanges across the world. The MimbleWimble could unleash this possibility for LTC.

Litecoin Unaffected By South Korean Exchanges’ Decision

At the time of writing, LTC’s price seems unaffected by recent developments. The cryptocurrency continues to move sideways and trades at $62.

LTC moving sideways on the 4-hour chart. Source: LTCUSD Tradingview

Larger cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, continue on the same path as they remain rangebound and unable to break above local resistance. Only Cardano (ADA), due to a surge in network activity, and Chainlink (LINK), due to its roadmap on staking, seem to be decoupling from the overall market.

Research firm Santiment noted:

Crypto prices chopped wildly in the opening week of June, but the result has been mainly no movement for Bitcoin and Ethereum. Altcoins, on the other hand, have shown major decouplings from one another, with ADA, LINK and HNT performing well.

Related Reading | Litecoin Drops 87% Trading Volume In Q1 2022

Additional data from material indicators, for low timeframes, records an increase in buying orders from retail investors. Larger investors seem to be selling into the current price action, but it is too early to tell if this trend will sustain for the coming days.

Retail (in yellow on the chart) buys as other investors sell (red, purple, and green on the chart). Source: Material Indicators

Litecoin major update MimbleWimble (MWEB) has been approved by a majority of the nodes and locked in for activation. This process will be completed in the next two weeks, at the height of block 2 million, or May 19th, according to David Burkett, lead MWEB developer.

Related Reading | Bitcoin Collapses By Most In Nearly A Month – Its Golden Days Are Over?

Burkett confirmed that users with the updated version (0.21.2) of the software will be able to start transacting with MWEB capabilities. This version is set to be released today after multiple years of development. Burkett said:

Anyone interested in using the MWEB, and especially those who installed one of the earlier release candidates, should upgrade to the official v0.21.2 before MWEB activates. If you wait until after MWEB activation to upgrade, you’ll unfortunately be required to resync the blockchain from scratch.

The most highly anticipated upgrade since its inception, MimbleWimble will provide Litecoin users with better performance and privacy capabilities. This could create more demand for the underlying cryptocurrency as it currently trades in tandem with larger cryptocurrencies.

The lead developer clarified that the upgraded wallet has been “solid”. However, there have been some changes as a result of fixed issues found during the update’s testing phase.

In a previous post, Burkett explained in greater detail some of the issues fixed during MWEB’s testing phase. These included fixing the wallet transaction history, issues with the mining logic, and a change in the spend code to prevent a bug with the subtract fee from amount functionality.

The developer successfully reported:

(…) the consensus logic has been solid for a while now, the wallet has undergone drastic changes these past few months as we worked to resolve issues found during testing. The major workflows all seem to be working well now, and I expect most people to be able to use MWEB without issue

Can The Price Of Litecoin Benefit?

At the time of writing, Litecoin (LTC) trades at $96 with a 22% loss over the past month and a 73% loss in one year. There seems to be no reaction from market participants over the upcoming release of MimbleWimble.

LTC’s price on a downtrend on the 4-hour chart. Source: LTCUSD Tradingview

Despite it being one of the most anticipated updates, LTC’s price seems to be following Bitcoin and larger cryptocurrencies in the short term. Data from material indicators point to two important facts for the future of LTC.

First, as seen below, retail and small investors (yellow and green in the chart) have been buying into the recent price action which supports the thesis that MWEB is an expected update. Probably, these investors expect appreciation in the long run as MimbleWimble could open the door to new use cases for Litecoin.

Retail investors (in green and yellow in the chart) buy LTC, as large investors sell (In purple and red) since April 2022, in a 1-week timeframe. Source: Material Indicators

Other investors classes have been selling into the price action until very recently. Investors (in purple above) with asks orders of over $100,000 seem skeptical about LTC’s price and have been dumping since April.

Related Reading | Bitcoin Tumbles Below $36K, Altcoins In Red Too

These investors have been slowing down on their selling pressure, at least, for short timeframes. However, buyers could have a hard time getting above $100 as there are almost $10 million in asks orders around those levels.