Litecoin prices have fallen 6% since the completion of its third halving event on Wednesday evening in Asia.
Quick facts
Litecoin prices fell 6.04% in the last 24 hours to US$86.16 at 3 p.m. in Hong Kong on Friday, according to CoinMarketCap data.
The latest Litecoin halving event dropped the network’s mining rewards from 12.5 Litecoins per blockchain minted to 6.25 Litecoins, which will decrease the supply of new Litecoins created by 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. “The price will increase if there is a similar increase in demand for Litecoin.”
“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,” stated Nick Ruck, chief operations officer at Singapore-based blockchain infrastructure platform ContentFi Labs.
As noted by Ruck, the recent hack on the decentralized finance platform Curve Finance and market speculations that US prosecutors may file a lawsuit against the crypto exchange Binance over fraud charges have both contributed to the unfavourable mood in the crypto market.
Following Litecoin’s previous two halving events in 2019 and 2015, the token’s value fell following halving and stayed rangebound for months.
Similar to Litecoin, Bitcoin has halving events that take place about every four years. Bitcoin’s second halving event is scheduled in April or May 2024, with U.K. bank Standard Chartered expecting a price of US$120,000 by year’s end.
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