In the series of high-profile listings, boutique digital asset exchange Gemini will add support for Litecoin (LTC) on Saturday 13th October. The listing will likely help improve LTC’s image and make it more accessible to a wider range of investors.
A blog post published on Friday said users would be able to deposit Litecoin into their exchange accounts as of 09:30 EST on Saturday morning. Announced only a few weeks before, it will be the fourth cryptocurrency listed in the exchange’s three years of operation. Trading would then begin on the following Tuesday at the same time. LTC will have trading pairs with three other assets – Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), Zcash (ZEC) – listed on the exchange.
Gemini’s Vice President of Engineering, Eric Winer, said the listing would help reinforce the exchange’s position as a popular gateway for investors to get exposure to cryptocurrency. “The addition of Litecoin further solidifies Gemini’s standing as the go-to exchange for retail and institutional investors alike,” he said in the blog post.
Winer also said that Gemini had planned to add Bitcoin Cash (BCH) to its servers at the same time. However, this had been postponed following rumors about a potential hard fork coming up in mid-November. It was concerned the hard fork would not have the same level of security features needed for the exchange to list BCH.
Gemini Exchange
The first time the community heard about a potential Gemini Litecoin listing was back in May. Forbes reported that the exchange’s owners, the Winklevoss twins, had obtained permission from the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) to list both Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash, although no dates had been specified at the time.
It was only midway through September that the community learned that Gemini Litecoin was a reality. Winer said at the Litecoin Summit in San Francisco that the exchange would be adding LTC to its servers on October 13th. The news sent Litecoin’s total value up by a modest $150m.
The last time Gemini added a cryptocurrency wasn’t all that long ago. The exchange listed the privacy coin Zcash in May of this year. When the news was announced, ZEC’s total value shot up by $400m.
The crypto community loves a listing; particularly when the exchange involved is picky on the coins it chooses. Any news of a coin about to be listed on Coinbase always sends the price shooting upwards. The total value of the decentralized exchange token 0x (ZRX) increased by $100m at the news it had been added to Coinbase Pro, its professional trading platform.
Despite one being on the East coast, and the other on the West coast, Gemini and Coinbase share a lot of similarities. Both are fully regulated exchanges, recognized and backed by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The number of tradeable assets is kept small; candidate assets need to pass through a series of legal and risk assessments before being considered for listing.
Rigorous listing policies mean successful candidate coins often experience marked rises; not just in value but also in status. Coinbase’s listing of Ethereum Classic (ETC), took the sector and ETC community by surprise. ETC’s Head of Community, Anthony Lusardi, admitted to Crypto Briefing that the Coinbase listing gave the project a much-needed morale boost. In the months following the listing, Lusardi said there has also been a noticeable increase in developer activity on the platform.
Gemini Litecoin Listing Will Likely Increase LTC Price
Litecoin has had a hard time over the past year. Its popularity has been on the wane. The number of LTC transactions on a daily basis has fallen from 200,000 transactions at the start of January, to approximately 23,000 this week. Since early April, there have rarely been more than 30,000 transactions taking place on the network.
No coin has had a good 2018; the price of most coins are a fraction of what they were at the start of the year. But some coins have been affected worse than others. Litecoin has sunk by around 82%; more than that of the total market, which has fallen by around 75%.
A recent report predicted Litecoin would continue to drop in value next year. A panel of nine experts argued that although the coin had some merit, they thought its current valuation was difficult to justify considering what it did.
The Gemini Litecoin listing will provide a much-needed boost for the LTC community. The exchange introduced digital asset insurance, backed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) at the beginning of October. More importantly, perhaps, it is one of the few cryptocurrency companies out there that the SEC actually get along with.
Working with a regulated exchange will provide the Litecoin project with credibility and a sense of certainty. As more investors, especially from the institutional arena, begin to enter the space, the emphasis of the discussions will shift away from technical differences and into whether assets can be invested into securely and legally. By being listed on Gemini, investors will now have another crucial inroad into trading LTC without fear of regulatory backlash.
The more investors can access Litecoin, the better chance the asset has of rising in value. If the Gemini Litecoin listing will provide a secure and legal entry into LTC, it might prove to be the lite at the end of the tunnel…
The author is invested in BTC and ETH, which are mentioned in this article.
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