Litecoin Rallies, Binance Announces LTC/USDT Perpetual Contract

While there is no clear reason why did litecoin (LTC) rally in the past 24 hours, it is now the best performing coin among the top 10 coins by market capitalization.

After lagging behind bitcoin (BTC), LTC has now increased by almost 6% in a day (BTC is up 5%). The coin trades (13:05 UTC) at c. USD 47.7 and is also up by 14% in a week. In comparison, other major coins are showing up to 3% gains today.

LTC price chart

This time last year, LTC was in the early stage of an uptrend that saw its price more than doubled in the first half of 2019 before peaking and dropping to USD 35 by December.

Earlier today, major cryptocurrency exchange Binance, said it will launch LTC/USDT perpetual futures contract on Jan 9, 2020, with up to 75X leverage. It will be the exchange’s sixth perpetual derivative product.

To prevent market manipulation on the launch, the exchange said it will implement a ±1% pricing limit on the marked price within the first 15 minutes of trading. The announcement is barely after a day after the exchange announced a similar product that will track the performance of XRP.

While this can be interpreted as positive, the LTC/USD market is largely unaffected. Gains have been marginal in the last trading hour and trending higher just like the rest of the cryptocurrency market. However, the candlestick arrangement suggests possible further upsides.