The price of litecoin, a cryptocurrency seen by some as the “silver to bitcoin’s gold,” has been bucking the crypto space’s bearish trend in the last 24-hour period, by moving up by roughly 0.4% in said period. Behind its rise may be Huobi DM launching LTC futures contracts.

According to CryptoCompare data, LTC has risen in the last 24-hour period and is currently trading at $32.3. The cryptocurrency’s market cap is currently at $1.96 billion

Litecoin's 30-day performance

Notably, it’s up nearly 10% in the last 30 days, countering the crypto market’s downward trend, which saw it drop 6.7% in said period, according to the MVIS CryptoCompare Digital Assets 100 Index, a market cap-weighted index that tracks the price of the top 100 cryptocurrencies.

Earlier this month the cryptocurrency surged after it reached 100 LTC Lightning Network nodes, and while its nodes on the layer-two scaling solution have kept on growing, its price performance in the last 24 hours seems to be related to Huobi’s derivatives market, Huobi DM, launching LTC futures contracts.

Per a press release shared with CryptoGlobe that has been shared online, starting today – January 25 – Huobi DM traders will be able to take both short and long positions on LTC, which allows for “arbitrage, speculation, and hedging.”

The CEO of Huobi Global, Livio Weng, was quoted as saying:

Litecoin is one of the biggest of the altcoins on the market today and we’ve seen quite a bit of demand for it by our users. We’ll be adding more coin types to the platform as 2019 progresses, with Ripple next on our list.

Huobi DM notably also offers traders weekly, bi-weekly, and quarterly cryptocurrency contracts for BTC, ETH, and EOS. Its platform has a 20,000 BTC Huobi Security Fund in place to protect users “against catastrophic security failures.”

Helping LTC’s cause are other moves, including a recent logo change that gained popularity after the cryptocurrency sponsored a UFC title match to increase crypto adoption late last year.

Taking into account comments on social media litecoin’s community appears to support the logo change. LTC is currently the 7th largest crypto by market cap.