As pretty much with anything that humans control, at some point, there will come a disagreement about how things should be done. This goes the same for cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin was the first financial system alternative that was decentralized, and all future upgrades had to be agreed upon by everyone. However, this did not go as planned one time, and a group that wanted a specific upgrade separated from the network and created their own called Litecoin.
Litecoin is a blockchain similar to Bitcoin with a 4x block speed and 4x the amount of coins Bitcoin has. It was created to be a “lite version” of Bitcoin that would be faster and that could be more useful for everyday payments. The ticker symbol for Litecoin is LTC.
Litecoin is the second cryptocurrency globally and the first one created by a network’s hard fork. A hard fork means when a blockchain network splits into two separate networks that function independently.
You can use your LTC in the following ways:
At the time of writing (May 16th, 2022), Litecoin’s price is $66.5. The current Market Cap ranking is #20, with a market cap of $4.6B.
The first half of 2021 was great for Litecoin after hitting the all-time high price of $386. That is a 3x gain over its price of $126 at the start of 2021. Since then, Litecoin has failed to get back to levels near its all-time high, and a market correction in 2022 has ultimately lowered it to prices of sub $100.
Since its creation, Litecoin has averaged a growth rate of 85.26%.
LTC’s max supply of tokens is capped at 84 million. Currently, there are 70.2M LTC tokens in circulation.
Since Litecoin works on a Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism, miners are rewarded in LTC for verifying transactions. The current reward is 12.5 LTC, but like Bitcoin, those rewards slash in half after some time. The next halving should happen on Aug 23, 2023, when the reward will be reduced to 6.25 LTC.
Litecoin is considered in the community as the silver for Bitcoin’s gold. It has 4x the supply of Bitcoin, and it’s being used as a test net to test out changes for Bitcoin before updating the Bitcoin network itself. With all of these said, here are some ways you can get your hand on some LTC.
The primary way people buy their LTC is through centralized exchanges because they offer the ability to purchase them with credit\debit cards, which most people prefer.
Although significantly more complicated, the second way is through decentralized exchanges such as Uniswap. Decentralized exchanges usually require users to already have some cryptocurrencies in their wallets to buy other cryptos.
Finally, it can be purchased easily through a broker app such as our Veli App, where you can get your hands on some LTC in just a few taps on the screen.
Litecoin was founded by Charlie Lee, an early cryptocurrency adopter and a name held in high regard in the cryptocurrency industry. Charlie Lee is an early Bitcoin miner and computer scientist who was a former software engineer for Google. In addition, Charlie Lee held the role of director of engineering at Coinbase between 2015 and 2017 before moving on to other ventures.
Today, Charlie Lee is an outspoken advocate of cryptocurrencies and is the managing director of the Litecoin Foundation. This non-profit organization works alongside the Litecoin Core Development team to help advance Litecoin.
Besides Lee, the Litecoin Foundation also includes three other individuals on the board of directors: Xinxi Wang, Alan Austin, and Zing Yang — all of which are accomplished in their own right.
There is no official roadmap for Litecoin. However, there have been talks in the community that Litecoin may release a feature called Litepay in 2022.
This Litecoin payment system offers an easy way to accept Litecoin payments, store and spend Litecoin securely, or turn LTC into dollars with the LitePay debit card.
Litecoin has a modest community of around 500k members over three major social media platforms Reddit, Telegram, and Twitter. Reddit is the biggest and most active one.
Litecoin is backed by several high-profile VCs and companies such as Asymmetry Asset Management, Bluefin Berkeley, Digichain Capital, Kenetic Capital, Block Ventures, Cypher Mines, Galaxy Digital, and Parallax Digital.
Also, Litecoin has raised an unknown amount of money during its four investment rounds. The last one was an initial coin offering round in December of 2017.
Litecoin has not faced any outstanding legal issues so far.
In the past few months, LTC network activity has slightly increased:
Litecoin’s biggest competitors are Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash.
Bitcoin is the world’s first decentralized electronic cash and cryptocurrency. Litecoin was created as a hard fork of Bitcoin. The main difference is that Litecoin is faster and cheaper than Bitcoin, with more supply available.
Bitcoin Cash is another hard fork of Bitcoin that is focused on the payments side of cryptocurrencies. It is faster and cheaper than Bitcoin but slower than Litecoin with less adoption.
Here are some additional numbers to present this competition in more detail.
Litecoin | Bitcoin | Bitcoin Cash | |
Transactions per second | 56 | 7 | 15 |
Time needed to confirm a transaction | 3-5 min | 60 min | 6 min |
Average transaction fee | $0.03-$0.04 | 1.62$ | 0.004 |
Market cap | $9.3b | $713b | $5.5b |
Circulation supply | 83.58% in circulation | 90.62% in circulation | 90.62% in circulation |
Total number of wallet addresses | 134m | 951.6m | 22.93m |
Total number of daily active users | 303k | 913k | 97k |
Launch date | 2011 | 2009 | 2017 |
Average growth rate | 90.44% | 80.79% | 82.36% |
As with any other asset class, there are risks involved when it comes to investing. Since there are many kinds of cryptocurrencies, risks can be grouped into two categories – general risks that apply when investing in cryptocurrencies and risks that only apply to specific assets.
We have prepared a guide that addresses general cryptocurrency investing risks and offers tips on how to mitigate them, while risks that only apply to specific assets are addressed directly in the coin guides such as this one.
Website: https://litecoin.org/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/LitecoinProject
Telegram: https://telegram.me/litecoin
Forum: https://litecointalk.io/
Litecoin was created as a hard fork of the Bitcoin network. With 4x time more supply and being more than 4x faster than Bitcoin, people have started calling it “silver to Bitcoin’s gold.” It is now accepted at over 1000 merchants globally, and on top of that, it is being used as a test-net to test out potential upgrades to the Bitcoin network. It has severe competition next to it, and only the future will tell if it will manage to get back to its former glory.
