Just recently the company Coinbase has decided to rebrand its exchange service by calling it “GDAX” the Global Digital Asset Exchange. Alongside this announcement the business is implementing Ether support and will enable the feature at the end of May. This news also brings good tidings to Litecoin fans as well when the digital currency’s creator Charlie Lee, who also works for Coinbase, also revealed Litecoin support is coming in the near future.
Charlie Lee at TNABC in MiamiLitecoin has been around for quite some time and was released as an open-source client on October of 2011 by Charlie Lee, who forked the original Bitcoin QT. Since then the cryptocurrency has seen a significant amount of growth. For quite sometime Litecoin had the second biggest market capitalization and when Bitcoin rose to USD $1,200 per BTC it also followed suite right behind it at $50 per LTC. Currently, Litecoin has dropped in value significantly since that point in time and has even lost its second place capitalization position to Ethereum. Right now LTC is the fourth largest cryptocurrency ecosystem as far as capital according to coinmarketcap.com. At press time, Litecoin is currently valued at USD $3.92 with a market capitalization of over $179 million.
Charlie Lee’s Litecoin has done well for itself over the years and has a very large hash rate at 1,319 GH/s keeping its network quite secure. This alongside merged mining many believe has also strengthened the Bitcoin ecosystem. Across a vast array of cryptocurrency exchanges, Litecoin is one of the only coins paired with other altcoins which means you can sell for LTC as opposed to BTC. Not many other altcoins can provide the same benefits and Litecoin also has a broad range of merchant acceptance as well. While everyone looks at the exponential spike in Ethereum’s value, much like Bitcoin, the digital currency Litecoin has remained quite stable.
Some LTC supporters believe the cryptocurrency is silver to Bitcoin’s gold, and many have referred to Litecoin in this way. Even Charlie Lee, the creator, has given Litecoin the same silver sentiment by stating to me in September of 2015 the same opinion. Lee told me in in an interview, “I think Litecoin is still very complimentary to Bitcoin — silver to Bitcoin’s gold, if you will.”
In July of 2013, Coinbase hired Charlie Lee a former Google engineer to help the company’s infrastructure and expansion success. Coinbase wrote at the time of hiring, “If you use Google Authenticator to secure your Coinbase account or Authy’s voice support feature to verify your phone number, then you’ve already benefitted from some of Charlie’s early work!” When this happened many in the crypto-community assumed Litecoin would be supported by Coinbase shortly after. However, it hasn’t been mentioned until now as Coinbase rebrands its exchange platform into GDAX.
Coinbase Exchange is rebranding to GDAX and will support ETH/BTC and ETH/USD trading soon. LTC/BTC and LTC/USD in the works!
— Charlie Lee Ⓜ️🕸️ (@SatoshiLite) May 20, 2016
The question is what will this do to Litecoin’s value when it gets implemented into the Coinbase system. Will Coinbase add buying and selling features within its wallet platform as well introducing LTC to a whole new market of customers? Whatever the case maybe support for LTC looks as though it is coming to the Coinbase GDAX service, and this gives the cryptocurrency one more leg up above the rest.
Source: Twitter
