What happened
Over the last 24 hours, the price of Litecoin (LTC 15.13%) jumped nearly 8% as of 3:40 p.m. ET after the payments company MoneyGram (MGI -0.19%) announced that it would enable users to trade and store several cryptocurrencies, including Litecoin, on its app.
So what
In addition to Litecoin, Moneygram will also allow users to trade and store Bitcoin (BTC -0.97%) and Ethereum (ETH -2.67%). However, with Litecoin having much less of a following and a much smaller market cap, the news did not move Bitcoin and Ethereum in the same way it boosted Litecoin.
MoneyGram’s CEO Alex Holmes said in a statement: “Cryptocurrencies are additive to everything we’re doing at MoneyGram. From dollars to euros to yen and so on, MoneyGram enables instant access to over 120 currencies around the globe, and we see crypto and digital currencies as another input and output option.”
Moneygram has served more than 150 million people over the last five years, so it certainly has enough scale to spread more awareness of Litecoin and potentially grow adoption of the token.
Now what
Litecoin is actually one of the earlier cryptocurrencies, having been launched in 2011. At the time, I believe the value was that it could process more transactions than Bitcoin. There is also a finite amount of 84 million Litecoin tokens.
Unfortunately, since then a ton of new blockchain networks have popped up, all seeking to increase the number of transactions per second they can process. For this reason, and given the ensuing crypto winter, I’m really only interested in the more established tokens like Bitcoin and Ethereum right now.
Bram Berkowitz has positions in Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Bitcoin and Ethereum. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
