The Litecoin network has seen sustained usage in 2019 despite the wider collapse in the majority of the cryptocurrency markets. According to dataprovided by Bitinfocharts, over $100bn was sent over the network in the 2019 period.

This was a decrease from 2018, mainly due to bull market peak in January where $5bn a day was being transacted. Omitting this activity in the first half of the year, it appears that 2019 has seen a slight growth in the average value transferred each day from ~$200m to ~$300m.

2019 notably saw Litecoin’s 2nd halving take place which resulted in increased speculative activity on the network. Omitting this data as deviating from mean market conditions would see a roughly equivalent value transfer between 2018 and 2019. This may speak to a wider base level interest from non-speculative network participants. This base appears to have strongly formed at around $100m/day within a steady amount of ~21,000 transactions.

As a result the average transaction value has found comfortable support at ~$5k/transaction. Taking a look at median transaction values however, tells us that this is being driven up by a handful of very large value transactions as the median is much closer to $50/transaction. It may be reasonable to hypothesise that the majority of value is from a small number of high net worth individuals, funds or services.

While $100bn is a staggeringly large number in comparison, it is dwarfed by traditional payment networks such as Visa, which reports a total transaction volume of $11Tn for the 2018 period. Visa even buries Bitcoin which transacted ~2.5Tn in 2019. Of course the comparison between the two is flawed, as Litecoin is a cryptocurrency and Visa is a service for fiat currencies, it does not take into account total value sent in $USD and only gives insights into one area of the larger market .

This does mean however, that there is a long way yet to go and lots of room for the crypto markets to grow, if they are to achieve that goal of displacing the old guard.