Are altcoins getting a jolt from Lightning Network marketing?

With the fundamentals improving for the Lightning Network – the number of open channels is now over 11k, from just over 9k a month ago – and atomic swaps for cross-chain transactions arguably being the next breakthrough for the technology,  what is often overlooked is that it isn’t restricted to bitcoin transactions but also a feature that extends to altcoins.

Although the transactional fundamentals for bitcoin have been on the wane for months, the number of daily transactions is down 54% from ATH in December and the USD value of daily transactions is down 88% since the start of January, the fundamentals for the Lightning Network could be providing a buffer for future expectations, which may extend to other coins using the infrastructure.

Some of the major altcoins that fared best in the mass sell-off (outside of BTC) and even advanced during the bloodbath have been those assets that have are working with Lightning Labs or have already got the Lightning Network tech on their currency, Stellar Lumens (XLM), Litecoin (LTC ) and ZCash (ZEC) just launched their own anonymous version of Lightning called BOLT. Micro caps with many of the same attributes as the above have also had a good run during the bear market: Monacoin (MONA), which is a hard fork of LTC, and Groestlcoin (GRS) which has had a phenomenal run over the past 7 days, up over 35%, in the midst of the alt-massacre.

Groestlcoin

Groestlcoin is a project that has been on the go since 2014 and led by a team of anonymous developers who have positioned it as a private and instant transactional crypto with “subatomic fees” (their own jargon for low fees) that would be an upstart to the likes of Litecoin (LTC) and Stellar (XLM). Its upwards movement in the past week has moved it up the BNC market cap rankings to 101 with a value of over $43m. For an obscure altcoin there has been a significant amount of buying interest with 24hr volume over $32m.

The underlying fundamentals haven’t changed much so what could have bumped interest and its price so significantly?

Exchange listings

Groestlcoin this week did just list on Indian exchange, UnoDax, and aside from that GRS is listed on 31 other exchanges, according to the Groestlcoin website. This is a huge spread of listings for an obscure coin and there are some reputable exchange names like Binance, Bittrex and Upbit among them.

Mobile wallets

It claims to have 11 different Android wallets, 10 Blackberry wallets and 3 iOS wallets, along with desktop wallets. Again, this seems like an absurdly high number.

Marketing/Buzzwords

It ticks all the boxes on the marketing front

• ASIC resistant mining
• Energy saving and lower power usage
• SegWit enabled
• Lightning Network ready
• Atomic swaps
• Zero fee/instant tx
• SMS transactions

Monacoin

Perhaps the only coin that’s even more beloved in Japan than Bitcoin, Monacoin is up about 11% on the past 7 days and held strong throughout the alt-slaught that started on Monday. The cat meme coin is the unofficial native cryptocurrency of Japan and is actually being used for mobile transactions. Cryptos are recognized as official tender in Japan and this is certainly a boost for MONA

Exchange listings

It is scarcely traded outside of Japanese and is listed on at least 4 major Japanese exchanges.

Mobile Wallets

As far as can be discerned, there are three wallets available that span Android, iOS and Linux systems.

Marketing/Buzzwords

• ASIC-resistant mining
• Instant transactions
• Segwit enabled
• Lightning Network ready
• Atomic swaps
• Low fee/instant tx

Conclusion

Litecoin has already made atomic swaps across blockchains and deployed the Lightning technology, Stellar is working with Lightning Labs to roll out the tech this year.  This is just a cursory connection and in future it would be expected the Lightning Network would only increase BTC dominance and that the "Lightning marketing" effect may be something worth keeping an eye on.

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Amid the bloodbath in alts this week anything tied to Ethereum or ERC20 tokens took a general hammering but it may be revealing to look into the coins that bucked the trend over the past 7 days. Apart from the stablecoins BTC was a sort of safe haven and those currencies that also fared better shared a commonality with it, they were Lightning Network ready or waiting to deploy the technology. With Ethereum’s scaling problems adding to the ETH dump this week, could "Lightning Network ready" coins be benefiting from a premium?