Litecoin (CCC:LTC-USD) is the 15th largest cryptocurrency, according to Coinmarketcap.com, with a $10.7 billion market capitalization. It is also one of the first blockchain currencies, emerging fairly soon after Bitcoin (CCC:BTC-USD). Therefore, Litecoin crypto is likely to rise along with Bitcoin if it starts to recover.
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So far this year, LTC tokens have risen about 26% year-to-date (YTD). It ended last year at $126.23 on Dec. 31 and on Sept. 22, it was at $159.82. Moreover, the crypto spiked to a high of $386.45 on May 8, up about 206% YTD at that point.
However, most investors should have sold then. That’s because Litecoin crypto immediately sank over several months to July 19 when it ended at $107.40 per LTC token. However, since then the crypto has floated up by 48.8% to $159.82.
Correlation With Bitcoin
Interestingly, this is similar to the path that Bitcoin has taken this year. At its peak, BTC was up 116% to $63,503 on April 12. Then it sank to its trough of $29,807,b also on July 19 (as with Litecoin). Since then Bitcoin has drifted up more than 46% to $44,600 on Sept. 23.
As an article in Cointelegraph points out, when Bitcoin moves higher, so do a number of the “legacy” cryptos like Litecoin. Litecoin was modeled after Bitcoin, and it tends to move in tandem with Bitcoin.
This is despite some of the differences that Litecoin has with Bitcoin. The chief difference is that Litecoin has a much higher supply of tokens. Whereas Bitcoin has a supply limit of 21 million tokens, Litecoin has four times that number at 84 million.
The reason is that its founder, Charlie Lee, wanted to position Litecoin as a “silver” to Bitcoin as “gold.” According to a recent article, he is quoted as saying he wanted the cryptocurrency to be a “lite” version of Bitcoin. So, one way to do this was to dramatically increase its supply.
The net effect is that Litecoin has had a similar correlation with major market moves by Bitcoin. However, Litecoin crypto has also had some major moves apart from Bitcoin. Here is one.
Litecoin Crypto in the News
On Sept. 13, investors in Litecoin woke up to a surprisingly new announcement from Walmart (NYSE:WMT) that the retailer was going to accept Litecoin as a payment method. The LTC coins immediately shot up by 34%, according to Decrypt online magazine
And why not? That would have been the first major company announcement other than Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) with its on-again, off-again acceptance of Bitcoin as a payment method.
The only problem is that the announcement was fake news. Walmart came out later in the day and said that this was not an authentic press release.
Nevertheless, one good thing to come out of this saga is that it shows that Litecoin is still seen by the public as a potential payment method. Recently PayPal (NASDAQ:PYPL) announced that its UK customers would be able to buy and sell four major cryptocurrencies. One of the four was Litecoin. The others were Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash (CCC:BCH-USD), and Ethereum (CCC:ETH-USD).
But it also shows that Litecoin’s correlation with Bitcoin is fairly well established. When any news comes out that it is being accepted exclusively (apart from Bitcoin) as a payment method, you can probably reject that as fake news.
Where This Leaves Investors In Litecoin Crypto
Litecoin is also slowly gaining acceptance in the Defi and Dapp worlds. Defi stands for decentralized finance and Dapp stands for decentralized apps. I wrote about this in my last article on Litecoin.
The result for most investors from our observation that Litecoin is highly correlated with Bitcoin is that LTC is a cheaper way to get similar performance as Bitcoin. The fact remains that one LTC token costs just about $160, whereas one BTC costs an astronomical $44,000.
So, assuming that Litecoin crypto should eventually have a similar price as Bitcoin, given its four-fold supply differential, its price should trend toward $10,866 (i.e., $43,465/4). However, given that Litecoin is not as popular, we need to substantially discount it.
Therefore, even if we took a two-thirds discount to Litecoin’s comp value with Bitcoin, it still should be worth $3,622 (i.e., $10,866 x (1-.6666)). That implies a potential upside of 22 times for LTC tokens.
Let’s say it takes five years for that to happen. That implies that the compound average growth rate (CAGR) will be 86.6% annually each year for the next five years. For most people, that is a pretty good expected ROI each year.
On the date of publication, Mark R. Hake owns a long position in Bitcoin and Ethereum but did not own any other security mentioned in the article. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer, subject to the InvestorPlace.com Publishing Guidelines.
Mark Hake writes about personal finance on mrhake.medium.com and runs the Total Yield Value Guide which you can review here.