Litecoin price (LTC)

About Litecoin (LTC)

Litecoin is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency created in 2011 as a lighter, faster relative of Bitcoin. It keeps Bitcoin's core design, a public ledger secured by proof of work with a fixed supply, and changes three things: blocks arrive about every 2.5 minutes instead of ten, the total supply is capped at about 84 million coins, and mining uses the Scrypt algorithm instead of SHA-256.

Who created Litecoin?

Litecoin was announced in October 2011 by Charlie Lee, posting as coblee, a software engineer who had worked at Google. The announcement described it as a lite version of Bitcoin with faster confirmations and Scrypt mining, and the network has run continuously since. It is maintained as open-source software by independent contributors.

How does Litecoin work?

Like Bitcoin, Litecoin groups transactions into blocks that miners add by solving a proof-of-work puzzle, and the winner earns newly created litecoin plus transaction fees. The reward halves every 840,000 blocks, about every four years, so issuance slows and converges on the cap. The reward was 12.5 LTC per block until the August 2023 halving, when it fell to 6.25; the next halving is at block 3,360,000. See the Litecoin halving page.

Litecoin uses the UTXO model, so your balance is a set of unspent outputs that your wallet spends and re-creates as change; the UTXO guide explains it.

Scrypt mining and merged mining

Scrypt was designed as a memory-hard function, and Litecoin's miners today use specialised Scrypt hardware. Because Dogecoin, Luckycoin and several other coins also use Scrypt and support auxiliary proof of work, the same hashing can secure more than one chain: this is merged mining, where a miner earns Litecoin as the main chain and Dogecoin and others as bonus chains for the same electricity. Estimate the numbers with the live Litecoin mining calculator or read what Litecoin mining is and merged mining explained.

Litecoin privacy: MWEB

In 2022 Litecoin activated MimbleWimble Extension Blocks (MWEB), an optional feature that lets users move coins into a confidential area of the chain where amounts are hidden. It is opt-in and does not change the 84 million supply; the specifications are in Litecoin's improvement proposals.

Litecoin price and volatility

Litecoin's price follows the broad crypto market and is usually more volatile than Bitcoin's. The chart and performance figures above come from Scrypt Price's aggregate of independent exchanges, and the market cap is Litecoin's exact circulating supply (calculated from the halving schedule) times that price. For a reading of what the numbers mean, see Litecoin tokenomics.

How to store Litecoin

You hold litecoin with a private key. A non-custodial wallet keeps that key on your device, so no exchange can freeze or lose it, and a written backup lets you recover it. Scrypt Wallet supports Litecoin natively, including receiving mining payouts; see the Litecoin wallet page and backups and recovery.

Sources: Litecoin announcement (2011) · Litecoin Core chain parameters · Scrypt (Percival, 2009) · Litecoin improvement proposals