Litecoin cuts loose

Hitting a roughly six-month high in excess of $280, Litecoin is in the midst of a furious rally.

LTC (+15% in 24 hours) once again leads the big coins in terms of one day's worth of gains. Momentum traders recognize momentum. Closely followed (by 142,000 paying YouTube viewers) trader/analyst Michaël van de Poppe just dropped a wildly bullish LTC forecast.

And speaking of momentum, Loopring (LRC), an Ethereum-run, open-source protocol for building automated marketplaces, has full mooned, rising 500% over a 28-day lunar cycle marked by growing chatter about speculation concerning maybe Loopring doing something having to do with non-fungible tokens (NFTs), possibly collaborating with GameStop, which is pushing into the NFT space (ShackNews).

The major majors, Bitcoin and Ethereum, both lost a little ground since touching, in tandem, new record highs on Tuesday – but not that much ground.

BTC's high, pegged, by various exchanges, as well above $68,000, looms massively in the rearview mirror and perhaps appears closer than it actually is. As of 8:30 a.m. (EST), the largest crypto straddled $66,800, according to CoinGecko.

The second-largest crypto, meanwhile, hit $4,850 yesterday. ETH has since shed 2%.

Most larger-cap alts are in the red today (CryptoPotato).

BTC’s recent breakout likely has legs, to the upside tune of $125,000, said Inside Edge Capital Management founder Todd Gordon, participating in a CNBC "how high the moon" segment. During it, Gordon recommended individual investors allocate 3% to crypto.

And while BTC is probably, at the moment, near the top of any near-term upward move, the longer-term trend remains firmly bullish, BeInCrypto said.

A decentralized network built on Bitcoin’s second layer, the Lightning Network uses smart contract technology to create a kind of under-the-same-banner annex territory. Thus, the "off-chain" Lightning realm allows for more and smaller-value BTC transactions at thunderous speeds.

Lightning has struck some attention-grabbing homeruns of late, with Twitter incorporating it for digital tipping, as well as its key supporting role in El Salvador's historic adoption of BTC as a legal tender.

Now, it was just today announced that, in a first, a Swiss-based crypto-payment processor plans to integrate Lightning (Cointelegraph). Bitcoin Suisse will use the network to make BTC transactions faster and less expensive.

Cointelegraph has previously chronicled the total capacity of Lightning witnessing “explosive growth” so far this year.

In just a few days this past September, the network saw almost 2,000 new BTC-storing channels opened. The network’s capacity reached an all-time high of 2,904 BTC, a capacity surge of 170% since the end of 2020. The coming months should see still more capacity gains for Lightning now that a major crypto broker in Switzerland is set to incorporate it.