Despite the latest crypto bull run pushed by the Bitcoin rally since this April, Litecoin, the world’s fourth largest cryptocurrency, doesn’t seem to get quite a boost from bitcoin upward move.

As the Litecoin halving draws near, the long-awaited halving event happening in August which is expected to supercharge Litecoin value, is likely to lead to the opposite – after hitting a 2019 high around $142 on June 22, the price of Litecoin saw a jump to a low of $80 on July 17.

According to Charlie Lee, investors may have learned from the history given that the LTC price went down before the last halving. Market sentiment could be acutely sensitive to the upcoming LTC block reward halving and might affect LTC price downward.

“If everyone believes that the price will be weak in August and they sell, then the price will go down in August.” The LTC founder said in an AMA on Chainnode (formerly 8btc Forum, China’s largest crypto community) on July 18. While he believes that halving will not have any long-term impact, though it may lead to price fluctuations in a short term.

Since the creator of litecoin sold all his litecoin holding at the time when LTC/USD hit all-time highs around $350, Charlie is deemed as the “king of selling the rip” (逃顶王 in Chinese character) in China. When asked how he sensed the bear approaching back then and sold his stake at highs, Charlie answered,

“I didn’t know when the bear market will hit, but I did know that it was bound to happen. Having been in this industry for 6 years at the time, I’ve seen multiple bear and bull markets. We always overshoot both on the upside and the downside. So when the market has been going up a lot, it’s always good to take some profit. That said, when I sold, I wasn’t thinking of timing the high. That was just luck. No one really knew and I didn’t know. I thought LTC might hit $1000 at the time.”

After his December sell-off amid the crypto bull at the end of 2017, the crypto market crashed since entering 2018, the practice did bring Charlie some profit though he said his intention is purely to avoid “a conflict of interest”, and he has still been working on Litecoin development.

With the vision that Litecoin and Bitcoin will be used as money by the world, Charlie believes litecoin sometimes act as a real world testnet for some of Bitcoin’s controversial technologies.

The latest development of litecoin is implementing MimbleWimble chain as an extension block, which will help make litecoin more private and more fungible.

When asked to predict the next record-breaking price of bitcoin and litecoin, the only two cryptocurrencies he’s holding, Charlie refused to give any predictions on crypto prices, but only answered that

“I believe the long term price of Bitcoin is much higher than Today. I would not be surprised to see something even bigger than 2017…”

I think the killer application of blockchain is and always will be cryptocurrency as money.”