Litecoin Bounces Off Firm Support as MimbleWimble Nears

Litecoin (LTC), the cryptocurrency created by Charlie Lee as a near-identical copy of bitcoin (BTC) in 2011, is once again gaining interest from investors as the price bounced off a key technical support level, while developers reveal that a testnet with new privacy features can be expected by the end of the summer.

As of press time on Friday (10:30 UTC), litecoin traded at USD 62.8, up about 1% over the past 24 hours and around 7% in a week. Meanwhile, bitcoin (BTC) was up 0.85% and ethereum (ETH) was up 2.25%, to a price of USD 9,126 and USD 236, respectively.

In terms of technical analysis, litecoin also looks relatively strong on a medium to long-term, as the asset appears to have bounced off firm support at the important 200-day moving average level (blue line).

The 200-day moving average is often considered a key level to differentiates between bull and bear markets, and is used by many long-term investors as a signal for when they should be invested in the market.

The most recent gains also come after it was reported last Friday that it will become possible to withdraw litecoin directly to Korean won (KRW) at more than 13,000 ATM locations in South Korea.

Meanwhile, according to a progress update published on Litecointalk.io earlier this week, David Burkett, the project lead for the Litecoin MimbleWimble (MW) proposal, said that the MW testnet will launch by the “end of summer” this year.

The testnet will reportedly include “all block & [transaction] validation rules, basic [peer-to-peer] messaging, transaction pool, syncing, and the ability to mine blocks,” Burkett wrote, while noting that it will not include “a usable GUI [graphical user interface] wallet for casual users to test it out.” As a result of a lack of a user interface, “transactions will likely need to be created manually at first,” Burkett wrote.

The MimbleWimble update to the litecoin protocol is said to improve on certain privacy features of the cryptocurrency, as well as making it more scalable and fungible. This is done by combining multiple MW transactions into a single transaction, thus obscuring any individual transaction data for outside observers.