Litecoin (LTC) price, chart and history
Litecoin is $69.21, down 1.29% in the last 24 hours. Market value $5.23 billion, rank #29.
About Litecoin
Litecoin (LTC) is one of the oldest cryptocurrencies still in wide use. It is a digital currency for sending value directly between people without a bank in the middle, and it is often described as the silver to Bitcoin's gold. Its main appeal is everyday payments: transactions settle faster than on Bitcoin and fees are usually a few cents, so it is commonly accepted by payment processors and offered on most major exchanges.
Litecoin was created by Charlie Lee, a former Google engineer who later worked at Coinbase. He copied Bitcoin's open-source code and changed a few key settings, launching the network in October 2011 with only a tiny amount of coins created in advance. The non-profit Litecoin Foundation now supports development and promotion. In 2017 Lee sold nearly all of his own coins, saying his influence over the price created a conflict of interest, though he kept working on the project.
Like Bitcoin, Litecoin is secured by mining, where computers compete to add blocks, but it uses a different puzzle called Scrypt and makes a new block about every 2.5 minutes. Supply is capped at 84 million coins, and the mining reward halves roughly every four years. It has tested upgrades before Bitcoin, such as SegWit, and added optional privacy through MWEB. Critics say it offers little Bitcoin lacks, and its privacy feature led some exchanges to drop it.
- Created by
- Charlie Lee
- Launched
- October 13, 2011
- How it's secured
- Proof-of-work mining using the Scrypt algorithm, with a block about every 2.5 minutes
- Supply
- Capped at 84 million LTC; the block reward halves every 840,000 blocks