First Mover: Privacy Is Litecoin's Ace in the Hole as JPMorgan Touts Bitcoin

Oct 14, 2020 at 12:48 UTCUpdated Oct 14, 2020 at 13:21 UTC.Litecoin, a nine-year-old cryptocurrency whose price returns have chronically underperformed the bigger and better-known bitcoin in recent years, is hitching its wagon to a new star: privacy.

Litecoin founder Charlie Lee told CoinDesk in an interview the project is now looking to adopt key privacy-enhancing features, which he sees as increasingly attractive to cryptocurrency users.

Litecoin is up 21% this year after a 38% gain in 2019, which pales in comparison to bitcoin's 59% year-to-date gain and a 94% increase last year.

Bitcoin is hovering near $11,400 at press time, having snapped a six-day winning trend with a 1% drop on Tuesday.

Notably, the cryptocurrency formed an "Inside day" candle on Tuesday, aborting the immediate bullish technical outlook.

Inside day candle occurs when the cryptocurrency trades well within the preceding day's high and low and indicates consolidation.

The seven-day average of bitcoin's hashrate or measure of the processing power dedicated to the blockchain rose to a record high of 144.29 exa hashes per second on Tuesday, surpassing the previous peak of 143.19 EH/s observed on Sept. 18, according to data source Glassnode.

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What's Hot.JPMorgan calls Square's $50M bitcoin investment "Strong vote of confidence" for the cryptocurrency.

Nasdaq-listed Marathon Patent teams with Beowulf Energy to co-locate bitcoin mining facility in Montana.