During today's trading the price of the currency rose as high as $186.89 according to CoinMarketCap.
While this may seem minuscule compared to bitcoin's sprint up to $17,000 plus, Litecoin started 2017 at a mere $4.33. At that price anyone could buy a few. Your return up to now would be about 4,215 percent, quite a bit better than bank interest! It also even compares well with the gain on bitcoin which is somewhat more than 1,600 percent. Some exchanges put the recent high at $18,300 with a gain of 1,800 percent for the year but that is still lower than the litecoin gain.
The evidence seems clear that Litecoin's gain so far this year is over twice that of bitcoin even though all the press and chatter is about bitcoin.
Litecoin often rises and falls in close concert with bitcoin
Some even suggest that litecoin is cruising in bitcoin's wake or riding bitcoin's coattails.
A recent CoinDesk article claimed that bitcoin and litecoin were "birds of a feather".
While the aforementioned explanations may provide a better sense of why both Bitcoin and Litecoin have pushed higher this year, certain analysts have started offering different points of view.
Some of them have asserted that Litecoin is a "Bitcoin hedge," as the latter currency's network is dealing with a high level of unconfirmed transactions.
Litecoin as a bitcoin hedge
Mati Greenspan, senior market analyst for eToro, was in this camp.
"Litecoin is more scalable by nature and with bitcoins mempool currently flooded with unconfirmed transactions Litecoin is looking much better than BTC as a medium of exchange," he said.
Charles Hayter, co-founder and CEO of digital currency platform CryptoCompare, also agreed that Litecoin is a Bitcoin hedge, stating that while the two are very similar, the altcoin has greater upside potential and less downside risk.
Bitcoin Alternative
Other market observers took a different tack, describing Litecoin as an investment that has been receiving tailwinds as market participants flock to cryptocurrencies.
Jeff Koyen, strategic advisor for 360 Blockchain, stated:
"All the attention paid to bitcoin in the past few weeks has served as a rising tide for all cryptocurrencies," he said.
"But with bitcoin overbought at the moment and Ethereum relatively flat, they're turning to Litecoin -- a grande dame crypto with reliable underpinnings and enough similarities to bitcoin that they're comfortable buying."
Yazan Barghuthi, project lead at Jibrel Network, also weighed in on the situation:
"We're going to see a lot of value flow into alt-coins driven by portfolio diversification and realization of gains," he stated. In a speculative market, with new non-savvy entrants, the alt-coins that will do the best are the ones with highest accessibility. With LTC being provided across the main exchanges - i.e. is highly accessible to the average investor, it is no surprise to see a large chunk of the Bitcoin to Altcoin flow towards LTC."
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