When forks occur, which is quite often in crypto land, the original one tends to have a good run up. This is largely due to the promise of free equivalent tokens from the new fork to holders of the original. Traders want to get in both for the price boost of the first coin, and the added bonus of free crypto, whatever it is worth at the time.
When Litecoin hard forked on Sunday at block 1371111 Litecoin Cash was born. There was a fair bit of controversy leading up to the blockchain split as LTC founder Charlie Lee called it a scam. His own coin however finally awoke from weeks of down trending jumping from $154 on February 13 by almost 58% to $243 where it currently trades a week later today. Renewed interest in LTC is likely come from the upcoming launch of LitePay which enables businesses and merchants to accept payments in Litecoin which is faster and cheaper to send than Bitcoin.
Litecoin Cash Lifts Off
Litecoin Cash landed on the Russian crypto exchange Yobit in the early hours of Monday 19 where it was valued at around $1.20 per token. Since then the price has gone skywards to a high of $9.28 representing an increase of over 675% in its first 24 hours trading. In the past 12 hours it has corrected a little back to around $7.6 where it currently trades. According to Yobit the 24 hour volume at the time of writing is over $4.2 million which is higher than Bytecoin, Rchain, Electroneum, Maker, and Decred, all of which are in the top 50 chart with a market capacity over $500k.
Since most major crypto exchanges did not support LCC it is unlikely that many LTC holders actually claimed their free tokens as the process was convoluted and involved opening multiple wallets and exporting private keys. LCC has also yet to be listed on the analytics websites such as Coinmarketcap and Livecoinwatch.
It is currently too early to tell whether this is an initial pump and dump or Litecoin Cash has any legs. Without more exposure on more exchanges it is not going to get the influx of traders that it’s big and disapproving brother has. There have also been a number of posts on social media throughout the day from users experiencing technical issues with LCC wallets. Good news for Charlie Lee and co but maybe not so for the creators of Litecoin Cash who are still pushing out their next best thing in crypto land.