Such threads pop up every now and then. There doesn't seem too much progress with LTC and XMR. But if you look deeper, you see:

- The Monero community has built a lot of tools in the last 2-3 years which allow to trade it P2P (via atomic swaps, for example) and thus you don't need the CEXes anymore.
- LTC has added extension blocks and Mimblewimble (MWEB), so it has optional privacy now. This was already some years ago but I think it isn't used as much as it could, so there's still potential for more adoption in the near to mid-term future.
- LTC's price grew 28% in the last 30 days, making it the third altcoin of the top 30 in terms of price growth behind only ETH and Chainlink. In the last year it grew almost 100% (in August 2024 it was about $65).
- XMR's price grew 75% in the last year, amid massive delistings. It couldn't hold a spike up to $400 but is performing still very well when comparing to most other altcoins.
- LTC is still strong in the "payment coin" market: it has 200k transactions per day (Bitcoin has 400k approximately).

Innovation matters mostly for new altcoins. For old coins, it's more important to strengthen the community and find new use cases. It will be interesting to see if there's a LTC ETF and how the market could react to this. For XMR I don't think an ETF is realistic in the current political landscape, but it seems not to need institutional money.