Litecoin Spikes to $200 Million Market Capitalization in Five Hours

At 17:00 GMT on 7th November, alt-currency litecoin reached its first $100m market cap milestone with approximately 23m litecoins in circulation, trading at a high of $4.40.

On 18th November at 17:45 GMT, litecoin crossed the $10 mark after spiking over 100% in approximately five hours bringing the litecoin market cap to well over $200m.

At the time of writing the price of a single litecoin has retreated to approximately $5.60.

Back in March and April this year, litecoin caught the market's attention when it spiked approximately 10,000% in a few weeks.

The rise, which happened during the bitcoin bubble when the price of BTC rose from $15 to $266, saw litecoin's value rise from approximately $0.05 to $5.00, and then correct to around $2.50 a couple of weeks later.

Litecoin's sudden spike in value may be coming on as investors and traders new to the cryptocurrency scene discover a plethora of exotic financial instruments, or it may be the collective voices of the cryptocurrency hardcore who lend their support to litecoin for ideological and technical reasons.

Litecoin's pull as an alternative to bitcoin lies partly in its alleged faster confirmation times for transactions, which makes it an attractive prospect for businesses, and partly in its democratic design.

The fundamental premise of litecoin was to keep mining a democratic process, keeping the barrier to entry low and affordable.

"Litecoin is designed to be inefficient on all common computer components meaning that a malicious entity need only produce a small batch of specialized/custom hardware to overtake all the commodity mining systems combined."

It has long been posited that litecoin is silver to bitcoin's gold, but there's no clarity on whether this is a fair or reasonable comparison to make at present as litecoin is only just over two years old, and still has an immature market.