Litecoin Price Forecast: LTC Outperforms Bitcoin While Abra Begins Its Transition
Daily Litecoin News Update
On Tuesday night, the Litecoin price spiked as much as 13% on Coinbase before giving up much of that gain. Something was driving investors to Litecoin, even though the broad market was correcting.
Prices remained high throughout the wee hours of the night, when Western Coinbase users went to sleep and Asians arose to trade their litecoins. In spite of the broad market correction, the LTC to BTC rate was up about 2.2% in a 24-hour period.
Chart courtesy of TradingView.com
The odd price surge did not miss the eyes of the mainstream media. The cause is being talked about all over the Internet; that is, a startup backed by American Express Company (NYSE:AXP) is choosing Litecoin over Bitcoin.
This is the first startup of its kind that AMEX is supporting on its credit card network, which allows buying and selling in Bitcoin (and soon Litecoin).
In case you missed it, the CEO of this startup was on Reddit on Tuesday, explaining why American Express is preferring Litecoin over other cryptocurrencies.
I’m talking about “Abra,” a one-of-its-kind investing application that allows inter-trading between 20 cryptocurrencies and 50 fiat currencies.
It is the only plausible reason to explain this surge in buying activity. Investors are finally coming to their senses. Abra is a bigger deal than we initially thought, and CEO Bill Barhydt did a great job in reiterating the same in his “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) session on Reddit on Tuesday.
Abra was initially launched on Bitcoin’s blockchain, with an aim to attract more users. After all, BTC users far outnumber LTC users.
But the application is shifting to Litecoin’s blockchain, as promised, and adding LTC as its native base currency in addition to BTC, which means that the prospective hundreds of thousands of Abra users will have an incentive to buy, sell, transfer, store, and invest in LTC.
The app is no joke. Abra doubled its user base last month and it’s witnessing an unprecedented surge in new sign-ups. The reason for the swelling demand is simple. People want to do away with their complex and less secure crypto exchange accounts and shift to a decentralized and secure trading platform.
Abra already has support from its investor, American Express, and it is looking forward to adding Visa Inc (NYSE:V) and Mastercard Inc (NYSE:MA). The CEO has also revealed that he’s in talks with European banks to add support for European users of Abra.
Bear in mind that, although launched worldwide, the app is most accessible to Americans and Filipinos since, for now, it only supports U.S. and Philippine banks.
So there’s a huge area of growth that remains to be tapped, both in terms of product features and target markets.
Analyst Take
After the “LitePay” fiasco, we’ve all turned more vigilant in our analyses. LitePay was just hollow promises. There was a lot of speculation over a project that had yet to see the light of day. Sadly, it never did.
But Abra is real. It is a fully functioning application that people have already begun using. There is obvious potential in it that only a fool would fail to see.
Given that this is going to be the first real-world application powered by Litecoin—and, expectedly, a very popular one—I expect the mainstream world to acknowledge and embrace Litecoin as it promulgates its potential. As such, my Litecoin price forecast stays steady with a price target of $400.00.
