Litecoin is slated to undergo its third mining reward halving in early August, after which the per-block reward paid to miners will be lowered by 50% to 6.25 LTC from 12.5 LTC. Leading up to the fact, the 12th largest crypto-asset by market value has managed to fetch some big gains lately, pushing its price to $92.58.

Several on-chain metrics have also flipped positive.

Litecoin’s Network Activity

Data from IntoTheBlock suggested that Litecoin had a strong month. Since the end of April, the total address count with a balance has increased “intensely.” There are currently 8.5 million LTC addresses with a balance last week.

Litecoin had a strong month. Total addresses with a balance has increased more intensely since the end of April and we now observe nearly 8.5 million LTC addresses with a balance!#Litecoin pic.twitter.com/seMsdiJEup

— IntoTheBlock (@intotheblock) May 30, 2023

Both new and active address count has been hovering close to the fresh all-time highs established in February this year. In fact, new addresses being created on the Litecoin network briefly surpassed new Bitcoin addresses.

Crypto-analytic platform, Santiment recently stated that if the trend of increased on-chain volume continues, it will be a strong sign that some big players are beginning to jump in on their LTC investments in anticipation of the halving.

“The LTC20 halving coming up on August 10th will be a significant event for the Litecoin network. Most experts expect the event to have a positive impact on the price of Litecoin, and we would be included in this belief.”

Litecoin’s hash rate has also been consistent. After a few minor dips, the processing power dedicated to the blockchain was up by more than 24% from 573 TH/s at the beginning of the year to the current value of 712 TH/s. Closely following the hash rate is the mining difficulty which stood at 25.12 million hashes.

Increased OI for Litecoin Futures

The upcoming halving event has managed to influence Litecoin’s futures derivatives contracts as well, which spiked by more than $420 million globally – resulting in a year-to-date growth of over 20%, as per data compiled by Coinglass.

As such, Litecoin Futures’ open interest has grown to the highest level seen since the beginning of last year. Open interest refers to the number of outstanding derivatives contracts