A good old 'blue chip', Litecoin, has flipped Ethereum in terms of active addresses.

Take a look:

We might suggest that Ethereum's onchain activity is under pressure because of high fees, sure. But what's driving Litecoin in opposite direction? How could a UTXO cryptocurrency coin flip over the biggest DeFi and NFT ecosystems token, ETH? Apparently almost 600K (!) people are using LTC on a daily basis.

Next. An experimental metric, "Payment count", has broke 2017 bull run all time high:

This specific UTXO metric counts the number of addresses which are receiving Litecoins. And it's very close to count of active addresses.

Okay, LTC belongs to UTXO. May be it makes sense to compare it's onchain activity to Bitcoin. Let's see:

Looks legit. No flippening Bitcoin for sure. But still, 600K Litecoin active addresses daily is quite outstanding.

The question is who is using Litecoin?

Any ideas?

References:

• Walmart Litecoin fake news - https://edition.cnn.com/2021/09/13/investing/litecoin-walmart-scam/index.html
• FLOKI - https://investorplace.com/2021/09/elon-musk-sends-fshib-and-floki-cryptos-soaring-with-new-puppy-pic/
• Safemoon - https://twitter.com/safemoon/status/1437438507832778759
• Saylor and Microstrategy - https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/michael-saylors-microstrategy-buys-5050-more-bitcoin-as-total-investment-exceeds-3-1-billion

While most top blockchains continue to struggle with an ongoing decline in daily network activity, Litecoin didn't seem to get the memo:

Despite a -13.8% drop in price, the amount of unique addresses interacting with LTC has grown by +47.5% over the last 10 days. Potential bullish divergence?

It's also worth noting that Litecoin's 365-day MVRV ratio is currently sitting at -39%, virtually the same level that marked the 2019/2020 bottom (respectively):

Historically speaking, there's still more room to the downside, but it'll be interesting to see if -40% gets confirmed as a de-facto 'bounceback' zone in days to come.

Oh, also, addresses holding 1k - 100k LTC have increased their holdings by 270,000 LTC (~$30m) since the start of the month:

Still early to tell, but I'd keep an eye on Litecoin's daily addresses this week. If the growth proves sustainable, it would be a rare example of network strength among crypto's top caps.

The BitMEX Perpetual Contract Funding Rate is an important way to gauge whether the crowd on one of crypto's top exchanges, is getting overly greedy or fearful.

The metric is defined on our Santiment Academy as a fee paid by one side of the perpetual contract to the other. When the funding rate is positive, Longs pay Shorts. When the funding rate is negative, Shorts pay Longs.

So in essence, as traders, we're looking for high funding rates (greed) to be indicative of a potential upcoming top, and low funding rates to indicate a potential bottom (fear).

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