Over the past 30 days the price of Litecoin skyrocketed from $4 on March 26 to $14.7 on April 24, nearly beating a three-year high.

According to CoinMarketCap, Litecoin is currently ranked the fourth most capitalized cryptocurrency. It has outperformed Dash pushing it to the fifth place. The total market cap of Litecoin has reached $746.23 million (50,800,157 BTC).

The Origins

Created by Charles Lee, Litecoin is an alternative to Bitcoin, often dubbed Bitcoin’s silver. It’s based on the Bitcoin protocol, but it differs in that it can still be efficiently mined using consumer-grade hardware.

Another positive feature about Litecoin is that transactions are confirmed faster than they are with Bitcoin. According to data from Blockchain.info, the Bitcoin network’s long-term average transaction confirmation time is just over 9 minutes per transaction. The equivalent figure for Litecoin is roughly 2.5 minutes, according to data from BitInfoCharts.com. An analysis of Google search data shows that public interest in both currencies have been highly correlated since the launch of Litecoin in 2011.

Cause of the Spike

Like its big brother Bitcoin, Litecoin is also going through a soft fork for SegWit. Litecoin now stands at 77% of the needed 75% for activation of SegWit. (In order to activate SegWit on Litecoin, 75 percent of the blocks need to signal for it, and it needs to last two weeks.)

Back in January, Litecoin founder Charlie Lee urged the Litecoin Mining community to support SegWit in any way they can, calling it not only a huge improvement for Litecoin but also “the chance to open a new paradigm for blockchain technology”. At that time, the approval rate was just 10 percent, but on April 1st, it boomed when F2Pool, Litecoin’s largest mining pool, started to signal for SegWit. This could have been the reason for the recent price surge, as insiders likely knew these events would happen before it became official.

Bat Pool, Litecoin’s fifth largest mining pool, joined in on April 4. Simultaneously, the price of Litecoin has doubled, peaking from around $4.30 to almost $9.50, before settling back just under 9 USD.

As the time of writing, F2Pool, Antpool, LTC1BTC, LTC.top have signaled SegWit on Litecoin. It seems that SegWit is just around the corner. In theory , Litecoin adopting SegWit before Bitcoin would make it the better coin. But no one is sure about this as the consumer price of Bitcoin and Litecoin usually trend in similar patterns. What we are confident is that Litecoin could be essential to help solve problems being faced in the crypto space.