Litecoin (LTC) Price and Market Data

Litecoin copied Bitcoin's codebase in October 2011 and then changed a small number of parameters: a four-times-faster block target, a different mining algorithm, and a larger total supply. Charlie Lee described it at the time as 'silver to Bitcoin's gold' — a companion coin rather than a competitor — and that framing has stuck, even though the two networks now share no meaningful technical roadmap.

The unit is LTC, divisible to eight decimal places. The smallest unit is called a litoshi, where 1 LTC equals 100,000,000 litoshi, mirroring Bitcoin's satoshi naming. Total issuance is capped at 84 million LTC, exactly four times Bitcoin's 21 million cap, which is a direct consequence of copying the halving schedule at four times the block frequency.

Litecoin targets a new block roughly every 2.5 minutes, compared with Bitcoin's ten minutes, so confirmations arrive about four times as often. Mining uses Scrypt, a memory-hard hashing algorithm chosen specifically because it was harder to accelerate with the specialised ASIC chips that were starting to dominate Bitcoin mining in 2011. That advantage did not last — Scrypt ASICs now exist and dominate Litecoin mining too — but the algorithm choice is still what distinguishes Litecoin hardware from Bitcoin hardware.

Litecoin also supports merged mining with Dogecoin: because Dogecoin adopted the same Scrypt algorithm in 2014, a miner can submit the same proof-of-work to both chains simultaneously, earning LTC and DOGE rewards from a single hashing effort. Most large Litecoin mining pools also mine Dogecoin for this reason, which links the security budgets of the two coins in a way that is easy to overlook.

Like Bitcoin, the block reward halves on a fixed schedule — every 840,000 blocks, which works out to roughly four years given the 2.5-minute target. In 2019 the Mimblewimble Extension Blocks (MWEB) upgrade was proposed, and it activated in 2022, adding an optional, opt-in privacy feature: transactions routed through MWEB hide the sender, receiver and amount from public block explorers, while the base chain remains fully transparent for anyone who does not use it.

• Block target: about 2.5 minutes, four times faster than Bitcoin.
• Halving interval: every 840,000 blocks, roughly four years.
• 1 LTC = 100,000,000 litoshi.
• MWEB privacy transactions are optional, not the default.

Litecoin's main practical role today is as a low-fee, fast-settling transfer rail. Confirmation times of a few minutes and fees typically a fraction of a cent make it a common choice for exchange withdrawals, remittance-style transfers, and payouts from faucets, gambling sites and micro-earning platforms that need to move small amounts cheaply. Its age and simplicity also mean nearly every exchange and wallet supports it, which matters more for a payments coin than any feature does.

It has essentially no presence in DeFi, NFTs or smart contracts, because the base protocol never added the scripting capability those use cases require. That narrow focus is deliberate rather than a shortcoming from the project's own point of view: Litecoin has stayed a payments coin while the rest of the industry built application layers elsewhere.

Litecoin's MWEB privacy feature created real friction with regulators and exchanges. Because MWEB transactions can obscure amounts and addresses, several exchanges in jurisdictions with strict anti-money-laundering rules either disabled Litecoin deposits and withdrawals or delisted LTC outright rather than build compliance tooling for an optional privacy mode most users never touch. That is a structural, ongoing risk for holders in some regions rather than a one-off event.

Merged mining with Dogecoin means Litecoin's security is partly a function of decisions made by a separate community and codebase; a major shift in Dogecoin mining economics can also move Litecoin hashrate. Litecoin also carries the standard fork-of-Bitcoin risks: it has far less development activity and a smaller, more concentrated set of active maintainers than Bitcoin itself, and its price has historically moved in close correlation with Bitcoin, offering limited diversification within a crypto portfolio.

As with any base-layer transfer, transactions are irreversible once confirmed, and sending to the wrong address or the wrong network (LTC addresses are not interchangeable with BTC addresses) results in permanent loss with no recourse.

Litecoin launched in October 2011, making it one of the first altcoins still trading today, predating Ethereum by roughly four years. For most of the 2010s it traded as a liquid, easy-to-mine testbed for ideas later adopted elsewhere in the industry: it activated Segregated Witness in 2017 before Bitcoin did, and it hosted one of the first cross-chain atomic swaps with Bitcoin the same year, both of which functioned as real-world proofs of concept for the wider ecosystem.

The 2014 addition of Dogecoin merged mining reshaped Litecoin's miner base permanently. The 2022 MWEB launch was the project's most significant technical change in years, but its rollout coincided with exchange delisting decisions that showed how privacy-adjacent features can carry compliance costs regardless of a coin's original design intent. Litecoin has otherwise avoided the contentious hard forks and community splits that affected Bitcoin and Ethereum, in large part because its governance has stayed simple and its scope narrow.