LTC & DOGE - Is Dogecoin keeping Litecoin alive or holding it back.

I've seen a few posts over on r/litecoin recently saying "LTC is going to explode any day now" or another asking "Will LTC ever make its real gains?" This prompted me to take a look at the charts as its been a while, I don't hold LTC or Doge so I haven't seen them since last year. All of these figures have been taken from Binance's charts.

LTC/BTC daily and weekly are both showing lower lows and lower highs. On 5th Dec 2017 the daily wick hit ₿0.000100, however the candle opened at ₿0.008914 and closed at ₿0.008500. That weeks candle opened at ₿0.008931 and closed at ₿0.009650. So I'm assuming that was in part due to a cascade of liquidations.

10 weeks later on 15th Feb 2018 Litecoin hit its all time high against Bitcoin at ₿0.025000 or $236.70. When LTC hit its fiat ATH of $413.50 on 10th May 2021 it was only worth ₿0.007000. In other words missed gains of around 350% if you didn't trade your LTC to hodl BTC in February 2018. It is also worth noting the previous fiat ATH was $367.00 on 19th Dec 17, so up a measly 16.7% in about 3.5 years.

On 2nd March 2022 we saw the lowest close at ₿0.002514. Almost 1000% down from its all time high. So what about the hashrate, is that dropping off to? I had a look on coinwarz and its quite the opposite.

We saw a peak of 320.1869 TH/s on 21st May 2018, about a month after the LTC/BTC ATH. It then dropped to 159.1199 TH/s on 10th Dec 2018 before climbing to its hashrate ATH of 468.5096 TH/s on 8th July 2019. We saw to local peak on the LTC/BTC chart of ₿0.017756 on 12th June 2019.

The hashrate dropped off after with a low of 138.3968 TH/s on the 16th March 2020. It has since be climbing back to its ATH hashrate setting higher lows and highs along the way. On 2nd March 2022 when we saw the ATL close of ₿0.002515 the hash rate was 418.9003 TH/s. As of writing this we've seen it peak at 465.4850 TH/s and I've no doubt in the coming weeks a new hashrate ATH will be set.

So why are so many people still willing to provide their hash power to Litecoin despite its dwindling returns. This is where Doge comes in. For those who are unaware, LTC and Doge are mined together. So unlike other PoW blockchains like Bitcoin or Ethereum where the entire reward is represented in one coin, you need to combine LTC's and Doge's prices to calculate mining profitability.

As we all know Doge absolutely exploded during the May 2021 bull run. Going from ₿0.00000119 on 13th April 2021 to ₿0.00001287 on 7th May 2021. Up 1081.5% in just 24 days, since then we haven't seen it go below ₿0.00000277 which is still up 232% from its pre-rally price.

Litecoin showed a smaller rally opening at ₿0.004086 and peaking at ₿0.007000 over the same time period. Topping at 0.007220 BTC four days later, up 71.3%. The current price of ₿0.002721 is down 66% from its pre-rally price.

So this got me thinking, is Doge keeping Litecoin alive or is it holding it back?