Litecoin is on fire! Over the last 24 hours, the crypto market took a big hit after the Federal Open Market Committee meeting, where the FED interest rates were hiked by another 75 extra basis points (BPS). The global crypto market cap also declined and is currently barely hanging on to its trillion-dollar market cap.
However, despite the bearishness that continues to beat up cryptocurrencies in the market, one appears to have bested all odds and is performing well despite bitcoin.
That cryptocurrency is Litecoin.
According to data from CoinMarketCap, Litecoin has risen by almost 14% over the last day, making it the best-performing crypto asset of the top 30.
As most people know, cryptocurrencies do not just rise in price for no reason. Asking why Litecoin's price suddenly began to increase seems to be in order. And as far as the on-chain data monitoring platform, Santiment, is concerned, they have a good reason for this price upturn.
According to the market intelligence platform, Litecoin has "decoupled" from the rest of the market today after its bullish move to the upside.
Santiment also notes that the number of addresses containing more than 1000 Litecoin tokens has gone parabolic since mid-June, and Bitcoin is taking a serious beating against Litecoin.
They add that Litecoin versus Bitcoin pairs have spiked and that Litecoin has grown by 25% against the flagship cryptocurrency since May and a staggering 51% since 12 June.
The number of shark and whale addresses on the Litecoin network has also witnessed an upturn over the last few months. Since May, Santiment notes, more than 300 new whale and shark addresses have been created.
Over the previous day, the price of Litecoin has increased dramatically, rising as much as 14% in value, with a daily trading volume of more than $2.12 billion.
This most recent price movement has occurred after months of stabilization at the $55 level.
LTC is now trading above the $60 mark, a price level that has historically been a point of resistance and has remained unbroken since mid-September.
With a significant increase from 41 in mid-October to 68 where it now sits, LTC's Relative Strength Index (RSI) above shows strong upward momentum.
This price movement can continue until the RSI exceeds 70 and enters the overbought zone.
It is also worth noting that Litecoin may have pumped due to an important announcement from MoneyGram.
This week, the money transfer and payment platform announced that users of the MoneyGram app will now be able to trade and store several cryptocurrencies on its platform, including Litecoin.
As per the announcement, users can buy, sell, and store Litecoin and Bitcoin (BTC), and Ethereum (ETH) via Moneygram (ETH).
It may be surprising that despite being featured alongside Litecoin in the announcement, the MoneyGram news did not affect Bitcoin and Ethereum in the same manner it impacted Litecoin.
This may have happened because LTC has a considerably lower market cap and a far smaller user base than the other two.
In a statement, MoneyGram CEO Alex Holmes iterated that MoneyGram regards crypto and digital currencies as another input and output option.
He added that the firm sees crypto and digital currencies as a worthy addition to everything MoneyGram currently operates with, from Dollars to Euros to Yen and so on.
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