Litecoin prices fall 6% after third halving event

Litecoin prices have lost 6% since it completed its third halving event on Wednesday evening in Asia.

Fast facts

• Litecoin prices dropped 6.04% in the past 24 hours to US$86.16 as of 3 p.m. in Hong Kong on Friday, according to data from CoinMarketCap.
• Litecoin’s latest halving event cut the network’s mining rewards from 12.5 Litecoins per blockchain minted to 6.25 Litecoins, which will reduce the supply of new Litecoins from miners.
• “If the number of Litecoins they mined gets halved, selling pressures will be halved from the miners,” said Litecoin founder Charlie Lee in a Thursday interview with U.S.-based crypto wallet firm Ballet. “If the demand for Litecoin is the same, then the price will go up.”
• “Although the halving would normally be a positive event for the price of Litecoin, the current bearish market and recent negative industry news has had a larger impact on trader sentiment,” said Nick Ruck, chief operations officer at Singapore-based blockchain infrastructure platform ContentFi Labs.
• The recent hack on decentralized finance platform Curve Finance and market talk of U.S. prosecutors considering a lawsuit against crypto exchange Binance over fraud allegations have both contributed to the negative sentiment in the crypto market, according to Ruck.
• Following Litecoin’s previous two halving events in 2019 and 2015, the token’s value slid after halving and remained rangebound for months.
• Like Litecoin, Bitcoin also features halving events that occur around once every four years. The world’s largest cryptocurrency’s next halving event is expected in April or May 2024, with U.K. bank Standard Chartered predicting Bitcoin price to reach US$120,000 by the end of next year.

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Tom Zuo

Tom Zuo is part of the Forkast.News editorial team.

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Eve Yeo

Eve is an experienced business reporter and commodities news editor. She has previously worked at print and media outlets such as Singapore Press Holdings, Shanghai Metals Market, S&P Global Platts and Argus Media.

eve.yeo@forkast.news