Litecoin: Despite rising activity, LTC fails to rise

• Network utilization outpaced market cap growth.
• Litecoin’s network usage charges were still significantly low.

Litecoin’s [LTC] on-chain activity was witnessing a late-year bump.

According to on-chain analytics firm IntoTheBlock, the active address count has exceeded that of Ethereum [ETH] since the beginning of December, signaling significant demand for the “digital silver.”

Source: IntoTheBlock

Network activity outgrows market cap growth

Along with the surge in active users, there was a considerable spike in LTC transfer volumes as well.

AMBCrypto’s review of Santiment data showed daily transaction volumes averaging $19 million in December, up from $16 million-$17 million in the previous two months.

The NVT ratio, which is negatively correlated to transaction volumes, fell in the same period. This implied that network utilization outpaced market cap growth, historically interpreted as a bullish signal.

Source: Santiment

Litecoin still cheap to use

However, despite the surge in traffic, Litecoin’s network usage charges were still significantly low.

Using Glassnode, AMBCrypto detected 1.19 million transactions on Litecoin on the 19th of December, higher than Ethereum’s count of 1.13 million.

But when it came to costs, Litecoin charged just $0.0019 per transaction on average, quite lower than Ethereum’s exorbitant rates of $12.19 on average.

Source: Glassnode

Note that Ethereum’s high gas fees have been an established constraint to its scalability in recent years. This has led to the mushrooming of scaling solutions.

LTC stays glued

Litecoin’s impressive on-chain indicators failed to exert any upward pressure on its native token, LTC. The 18th largest crypto by market cap remained unmoved in the last 24 hours of trading, AMBCrypto noted using CoinMarketCap data.

In stark contrast to the gains made by other altcoins over the last month, the “digital silver” remained glued, with insignificant gains of 0.4%.

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Whales also seemed to have turned their backs on the coin. A noteworthy drop in transactions worth at least 100,000 was observed over the last 10 days, data from Santiment revealed.

Source: Santiment

The decline in transactions could be a result of a bearish narrative around the asset. The Weighted Sentiment indicator trended in the negative zone after the first week of December.