LTC/USD lethargic in a range, Litecoin releases an update

Litecpon (LTC) is moving inside in a tight range since the start of the week. The coin is trading at $43.47, mostly unchanged both since the start of the day and on a day-to-day basis, while the short-term sentiments are bearish. Litecoin is the seventh largest digital asset with the current market value of $2.8 billion and an average daily trading volume of $1.6 billion. 

LTC/USD: Technical picture

On the daily chart, LTC/USD is sqeezed between SMA50 at $45.00 on the upside and a combinatin of SMA100 and the lower boundary of the Bollinger Band at $42.85. A sustainable move outside this range is needed to define the further price direction. The coinhit the bottom at $41.45 on June 15 and recovered above $43.00 since that time. Howewver, the upside momentum seems to be limited for now. The flat RSI on the daily chart supports the range-bound scenario.

A sustainable move above the upper boundary of the channel will allow for an extended recovery towards the upper line of the daily Bollinger Band at $48.50 followed by the the daily SMA200 and June 2 high at $49.50. 

Meanwhile, if the price moves below $42.50, the sell-off is likely to continue with the next focus on the recent low.

LTC/USD daily chart

A new version of Litecoin Lightning Network Daemon is released

Litecoin’s Core developer Loshan announced release of Litecoin Lightning Network Daemon (lndltc) v0.10.1 beta. lndltc is an open source implementation of the Lighting Network. It is developed by ‘Lightning Labs’. The recent release is currenlty the most stable version of lnd for Litecoin users that includes numerous changes. The version allow for larger litecoin payments ‘as well as potentially more efficient payment routing’. 

 Bryan Vu, Lightning Labs VP of product commented:

With the original Lightning protocol, one of the challenges was that the fee amount to be used for force closing a channel on-chain had to be negotiated and agreed upon ahead of time. Throughout most of the lifetime of Lightning, this hasn’t been a problem because fees have been relatively low and predictable. However, in cases where a channel might be open for long periods of time in which fees could go up significantly, or when a channel is opened during times of volatile on-chain fees, incorrect fee estimation or prediction could make emergency channel closing unreliable.