Litecoin price hits new high, Coinbase considers adding LTC

With the rising price of Litecoin (LTC) and the expected activation of Segregated Witness (SW, SegWit), Bitcoin’s “little brother” is likely to be added to Coinbase soon.

Coinbase Lists Litecoin

Litecoin is currently the focus of the blockchain field because SW is about to be activated in this system, and its price has also reached a new high since 2014. Now, it seems that Coinbase is likely to add Litecoin.

A recent conversation on Twitter between Litecoin founder Charlie Lee and Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong indicated that both parties would like to see Litecoin listed on Coinbase so that users can simply purchase this alternative coin with fiat currency.

Although Coinbase's GDAX exchange has already opened Litecoin trading, the launch on the main Coinbase platform is more significant because Coinbase is aimed at mainstream users entering the cryptocurrency field, while GDAX is more targeted at experienced traders. After Coinbase launches Litecoin, users can directly purchase it with fiat currency.

Earlier this month, Coinbase received approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to offer customers the option to trade litecoin and ether (Ether), making it the first New York-based exchange to cater to both litecoin and ether (ETH) markets.

Litecoin is about to activate SW

The reason why Lee considered letting Coinbase list Litecoin is that the daily trading volume of Litecoin on GDAX has exceeded $10 million. Yesterday, the price of Litecoin rose by about 20% , reaching a high of 12.7美元.

The rise in Litecoin prices is related to the activation of SW. Currently, the support rate of miners for SW has reached 69.4%.

Once the 75% activation threshold is reached, miners need to maintain this number for an additional two weeks (until block 8064). If SW is really activated in the Litecoin system, the following period of time will be crucial to the future development of Bitcoin, because it can test the scalability of SW for Bitcoin. If the Litecoin price continues to grow after SW is activated, miners' income will increase, and Bitcoin miners will choose to support SW.

Attitude towards SW

Although large Litecoin mining pools such as F2Pool (34%), Batpool (11.6%) and HappyChina (9.8%) have already supported SW, there are still some mining pools that refuse to change their stance. The most notable one is the second largest Litecoin mining pool, LTC1BTC.

Its founder Jiang Zhuoer once said in an interview that Litecoin Mining Pool would not support SW, and he also said that other major Litecoin mining pools would make the same choice. It turned out that he was wrong.

Currently, only Litecoin Pool (11.8%), BW (11%), Antpool (2.6%), LTC.top (2.4%), and Prohashing (1.4%) do not support SW. Given that Antpool and Prohashing support Bitcoin Unlimited, it seems unlikely that they will support SW.

Now it depends on Biwang. Although it is not clear what Biwang’s attitude is at present, it can be seen from the recent tweets of this mining pool that they will make a statement soon.

As long as there is 11% computing power support from the coin network, SW is likely to be activated.

Translator's note: Wang Chun, the founder of F2Pool, tweeted yesterday that he would reconsider whether to support SW, because he believes that the SW code is directly extracted from Bitcoin, which is too complicated and may have a negative impact on Litecoin. Therefore, there is still great uncertainty as to whether Litecoin can eventually activate SW.