Litecoin Price News: Open Interest Nearly Doubles – Can LTC Make A Breakout?

Litecoin (LTC) has gone up by 3.3% in the past 24 hours after bouncing strongly off the $70 support.

Trading volumes have jumped as a result, currently sitting at $630 million. This figure accounts for 11% of the token’s circulating market cap and confirms strong buying interest at these levels.

That said, LTC has been a clear laggard in 2026. Even though other altcoins like XRP, Solana, and Ethereum have performed quite well during the first half of January, LTC has booked a 3% loss.

January has typically been a good month for altcoins, which means that sentiment toward them may have changed for some reason.

Last year wasn’t that good either, as Litecoin booked a 22% loss. However, considering how other altcoins of its size fared, it wasn’t the worst year either.

A lot of expectations were placed on the launch of LTC-linked exchange-traded funds (ETFs). However, these vehicles failed to attract meaningful interest from Wall Street.

Data from SoSoValue shows that the only spot LTC ETF that has been approved by the SEC thus far has brought in a meager $7 million in assets.

OI Shows Strong Bullish Positioning in Litecoin Futures

Meanwhile, data from Artemis shows that weekly trading volumes have cratered lately dropping from $7.8 billion back in early November to just $2.6 billion as of last week.

Just to be clear, this is not a market-wide trend. In fact, some assets have actually seen a spike in weekly volumes lately.

Litecoin (LTC) Open Interest – Source: CoinGlass

Now, a futures market metric called open interest (OI) reveals that someone seems to be positioning for either a big drop or a major decline.

In dollar terms, this uptick is relatively small but, when expressed in LTC, which is the best way to filter out the impact of dollar-value changes in the price, OI has nearly doubled in just five days.

Traders are clearly positioning for a big move. Taking a closer look at this phenomenom, we can see that Binance’s ratio of accounts with open long and short positions has been progressively expanding from 66% (longs dominate) to 70% at the time of writing.

Hence, it looks like these new positions that are being opened in the futures market are long ones. Are bulls betting that LTC has hit bottom at $70?

LTC Could Drop to $60 If It Loses This Key Support

The daily chart shows that LTC has, for now, bounced off the $70 – $73 level. The last time the price hit this mark, it quickly recovered to $85 or so.

LTC/USD Daily Chart (Bitstamp) – Source: TradingView

This shows that buying interest at these levels is strong. However, the more times the price of an asset has to move down to a previous level to find liquidity, the higher the odds of a bearish breakout.

Volumes had been rising as LTC neared this area. Today, they have already surpassed the 14-day moving average. A decisive move to $80 will show that buying pressure at these levels remains strong.

This could result in a rapid recovery for LTC, and could be what these long positions in the future markets are expecting.

That said, if we get a bearish breakout below this mark, that could set off a deeper correction to the low 60s – levels that LTC has not hit since April last year.