To say the least, Q1/2021 has demonstrated itself to be a special moment for the history books. The crypto space was bombarded with announcements such as Tesla buying and accepting Bitcoin, Miami becoming a crypto citadel, and PayPal releasing its “Checkout with Crypto” pay option, to name a few. Interest in crypto has noticeably increased and by tuning into financial media outlets, one would notice that the term “crypto” is now commonly brought up.

Q1 has also proven itself to be a historical time for Litecoin, marked by the code-completion of the MWEB project. MWEB is a revolutionary upgrade to the Litecoin protocol (Mimblewimble via Extension Blocks) — the first of its kind, which will make Litecoin the most fungible cryptocurrency in the top 10. This upgrade will allow Litecoin to become much more scalable and make transaction amounts un-viewable to the public, making it the ideal choice for payments while protecting sender/receiver’s data. To learn more about MWEB, please visit here.

In this Q1 report, we’ll mostly be diving into Litecoin’s metrics and other, less talked about announcements from the beginning of the year.

• Since January 1 to March 31st, the end of Q1, Litecoin’s price increased from $127 to $198, achieving a 55% increase in three months.
• Litecoin has also seen a significant increase in daily transactions, with a range between 50–60k transactions per day the first week of January, to a current range between 100k-116k transactions per day the last week of March. The average amount of daily transactions has approximately doubled in 3 months.
• Litecoin’s number of new address creations per day have also grown by about double.
• The average amount of “Litecoin” related tweets per day the first week of the quarter was approx. 1280 Litecoin tweet/day. The average amount of Litecoin tweets per day the last week of Q1 has been approx. 2,100 tweets/day, also doubling.

Q1 also marked a historical milestone for Litecoin — 2 million mined blocks. Essentially, Litecoin will be heading into its 10th year anniversary later this year with fully uninterrupted service of its network, maintaining 100% uptime since inception. This is an accomplishment that contributes to Litecoin’s reputation as being a reliable cryptocurrency with long-term consistency and functionality.

Perhaps, it’s this very same long-term persistence and reliability that’s made Litecoin a popular choice amongst institutional investors via the Grayscale fund. Since January 1, Grayscale’s Litecoin AUM (asset’s under management) has increased 100.69% — from $145 million to $291 million. Not to mention, the Litecoin Grayscale Trust currently has a massive premium of about 508%, meaning there’s demand. Litecoin is currently the third most institutionally bought cryptocurrency via Grayscale investments and the one with the highest premium. It’s estimated that Grayscale purchased approximately 80% of all newly mined Litecoin’s throughout the month of February.

It’s likely that as more institutions continue entering the crypto-sphere, more will learn about Litecoin’s long-term performance and become attracted to its continued persistence over time.

Alongside the ongoing growth of Litecoin’s network metrics, several companies have announced that they’re integrating Litecoin.

• PayPal — although PayPal adding Litecoin to its platform is last year’s news, PayPal just recently announced their “Checkout with Crypto” feature. U.S. PayPal customers will now be able to spend their Litecoin online at about 29 million merchants.
• Vaultoro. — the first gold/Bitcoin and Litecoin exchange in the world that permits anyone the ability to audit and make sure its reserves are at 100%, operating via the “glass books protocol”. Vaultoro permits real-time trading between Litecoin and physical gold, which is stored in a facility in Switzerland.
• Flare Network — a platform that permits integrated cryptocurrencies to gain access to Ethereum-style smart contracts. A pool of 5 billion Flare tokens are being reserved for participants who use their Litecoin on the Flare Network as an incentive for the community to engage on its platfom.
• Unstoppable Domains — a company that lets you convert traditional wallet addresses into human-readable addresses for sending coins to. It can be an intimidating experience for a newcomer to send Litecoin to an address that looks like “MLos7u44mMq1ufgPJZTatEfPm3Kgxj5Nt9”, etc. instead of an address that looks like “ana.crypto”. Unstoppable Domains has collaborated with the Litecoin Foundation’s official wallet, the Litewallet, to integrate this capability and create a more user-friendly experience.
• Moon — a prepaid “virtual” card that you can load with Litecoin and spend at any online store that accepts Visa cards for payment. In practical terms, you can spend your Litecoin almost anywhere online. Instead of holding a physical credit card, you’re provided a “virtual” card. To make a payment, you insert the digits provided to you on the “virtual card” — exactly how you would with a physical card, the only difference being that the virtual card is loaded with Litecoin and automatically converted into fiat for the company receiving the payment.

Although in the crypto space, it seems like we are constantly bombarded with information on a daily basis, it’s necessary to sit down, observe and carefully analyze the progress that’s been made. In a matter of only 3 months, most of Litecoin’s stats have doubled. The underlying network and state of Litecoin has continued to demonstrate growth and strength.

The year has only just begun and there’s much more to look forward to in the coming months considering MWEB is now code complete and undergoing reviewal. 2021 will be a crucial time as Litecoin and the community prepare itself for its most significant upgrade since SegWit — not to mention, also celebrating its 10th anniversary of flawlessly pumping block after block. To celebrate this, the Litecoin Foundation will be rewarding Litecoin to a few lucky winners.

For continued updates on the Litecoin project, please follow https://twitter.com/LTCFoundation.

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