Litecoin Cash receives important boost after Sunday’s hard fork

Both Litecoin and Litecoin Cash are registering significant price boosts, with the latter actually growing by 600% over the past 24 hours. According to Inverse, Litecoin Cash, a cryptocurrency aimed at working as “the silver to Bitcoin’s gold,” citing its creator, was apparently unaffected by a hard fork promising a more widespread use of mining hardware.

On Tuesday, a Litecoin token was trading at around $245, marking a 9.22 percent increase, while the total market cap was $13.6 billion, which currently makes it the fifth-largest crypto coin. However, it has a lot of potential, considering that it offers block times four times faster than Bitcoin, which has an average of 10 minutes.

That’s one amazing growth!

As for Litecoin Cash, it was one of the past weekend’s superstars. Right after Sunday’s hard fork, when it was trading at $1.44 per token, it managed to reach an impressive $9.18, with a 24-hour trading volume of $17.86 million.

Compared to the original project it split from, the new Cash is a bit different. Specifically, the main difference is the fact that it made a switch from the Scrypt algorithm for mining to SHA-256. This allows even older hardware to create new tokens on the Litecoin network.

A funny detail is that community members are currently confusing Litecoin and Litecoin Cash, due to its name. However, this is not something new, since the same thing happened with Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, a project launched in August 2017.

“The Litecoin team and I are not forking Litecoin,” Charlie Lee, creator of the original Litecoin, said on Twitter, just before this weekend’s fork.

“Any forks that you hear about is a scam trying to confuse you to think it’s related to Litecoin. Don’t fall for it and definitely don’t enter your private keys or seed into their website or client. Be careful out there!”

Is it actually necessary?

Despite this initial enthusiasm and spectacular growth rate, some investors are questioning the value Litecoin Cash can bring to the cryptocurrency market.

“Litecoin Cash doesn’t bring anything to the table,” said Trevor Gerszt, CEO of crypto investment service CoinIRA. “It touts that it has more coins and faster transaction times, but Litecoin already has more coins than Bitcoin, and Bitcoin Cash was developed to solve the problem of slow transaction times.”