Litecoin Prices Surge to 3-Year High As Tech Upgrade Nears

The price of litecoin surged to a more than three-year high earlier today.

Over the course of a particularly active session, the cryptocurrency, once marketed to as the "silver to bitcoin's gold", reached as much as $15.09 at approximately 00:30 UTC, its highest since March 2014, according to data from CoinMarketCap.

At the time of report, the digital asset had fallen slightly to $14.48 – yet this figure was still three times higher than price observed last month.

After years of dormancy, litecoin has seen its price rally lately as it comes ever closer to obtaining the miner support it needs to activate a technical upgrade called Segregated Witness. (Should current support levels hold, it's expected upgrade will "lock in" in about two weeks).

At the time of report, 77.81% of litecoin miners were signaling their support for the upgrade. SegWit, a solution originally created for bitcoin, would increase litecoin's block capacity by reducing the amount of data associated with each individual transaction.

As such, the support that miners have been showing for this solution is cited as the primary influence on the recent price increase.

"Over the past week, LTC basically moved in tandem with the percentage of miners supporting it. Miner support is now 99.65% [in the past 24 hours], so litecoin is doing well," said Tim Enneking, chairman of cryptocurrency hedge fund Crypto Asset Management.

Over the long-term, litecoin's implementation of SegWit could have many positive implications, other analysts said.

Jacob Eliosoff, a cryptocurrency fund manager, spoke to this situation:

Trampoline image via Shutterstock; Graph image via CoinMarketCap