The live price of Litecoin is - per (LTC / USD) with a current market cap of $7.45B USD. 24-hour trading volume is - USD. LTC to USD price is updated in real-time. Litecoin is -% in the last 24 hours with a circulating supply of 75.87M.
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Litecoin (LTC) is a cryptocurrency for peer-to-peer (C2C) payments. It was forked from Bitcoin in 2011. It is one of the first cryptocurrencies after Bitcoin and one of the earliest competitive coins, helping users to make payments quickly.
Litecoin has many similarities with Bitcoin, but focuses more on improving the efficiency of C2C payment and collection. Currently, thousands of retailers and merchants around the world are using Litecoin. Both Bitcoin and Litecoin use the Proof of Work (PoW) consensus mechanism to protect network security. The main difference is that the two use different algorithms. Bitcoin uses the SHA-256 algorithm, while Litecoin uses the Scrypt algorithm.
The founder of Litecoin is Charlie Lee, a former Google employee. He forked the original source code of Bitcoin and modified it into a new code, planning to create an optimized payment solution that can replace Bitcoin. LTC prices are updated in real time on Binance.
Litecoin was launched as a fork of the Bitcoin network in 2011, aiming to improve upon Bitcoin's shortcomings. It was the first altcoin with the goal of providing a decentralized peer-to-peer currency with faster transaction processing times and lower fees than Bitcoin.
As is evident from LTC's price and market cap, Litecoin was one of the top five cryptocurrencies in December 2017. However, since then, LTC's popularity has declined as more altcoins have taken over the market share, and its ranking among altcoins has slipped to the top 20.
One of Litecoin's main goals is to prevent the centralized mining seen in Bitcoin. As a result, the LTC coin uses a different algorithm called Scrypt, which makes it difficult for large mining farms to dominate. Scrypt achieves this by making mining more memory-intensive and much slower than the Bitcoin mining algorithm. While LTC has failed to prevent mining farms from eventually controlling the majority of mining activity, its focus has shifted to becoming an efficient payment system.
While Litecoin shares some similarities with Bitcoin, the two cryptocurrencies differ in aspects such as hashing algorithms and block creation times. The Bitcoin network takes 10 minutes to create a block and can process about 5 transactions per second. The long processing time makes Bitcoin inefficient as a payment method, and merchants may have to wait up to an hour to receive payments.
Like BTC, LTC is not a pre-mined cryptocurrency. In other words, it requires a mining mechanism that provides new tokens to the open market. Mining consolidates the circulation system of LTC, and miners will receive newly minted tokens as rewards if they succeed.
Like Bitcoin, Litecoin has chosen a limited supply model. However, while Bitcoin has a maximum supply of 21 million, LTC has a maximum supply of 84 million. This specific cap was chosen so that the last LTC can be mined in 2142, two years after BTC is mined out. Currently, there are about 70.8 million LTC in circulation.
The mining reward is halved every 840,000 blocks to limit the supply of coins and maintain the value of the token. This is the same halving mechanism as Bitcoin.
As of September 2022, the total number of Litecoin in circulation is over 71.14 million. This means that there are about 13 million LTC tokens left to be mined.
The much-anticipated Litecoin halving took place on August 2, 2023, and went very smoothly without any technical glitches. The Litecoin halving event is scheduled to take place every four years on the Litecoin blockchain.
The halving will reduce the block reward received by miners by half, thereby reducing the number of Litecoins generated each day, thereby controlling the inflation rate of Litecoin and ensuring that its total supply is always limited. Litecoin’s block reward structure has been cut in half from 12.5 LTC to 6.25 LTC in the 2023 halving.
Litecoin was founded by former Google software engineer Charlie Lee, also known as “Chocobo.” Lee called Litecoin, which uses Bitcoin’s source code, “Bitcoin Lite.” He also called the coin “the silver to Bitcoin’s gold”
Lee served as Director of Engineering at Coinbase from 2015 to 2017. He is also a director of the Litecoin Foundation, a Singapore-based nonprofit dedicated to the development and promotion of LTC.
In December 2017, Lee sold all of his shares in Litecoin, saying he had a conflict of interest in talking about the cryptocurrency while influencing it.
Over the years, Litecoin has built merchant-centric solutions and partnerships to establish LTC as a cryptocurrency suitable for small payments. Charlie Lee has also successfully aligned the supply frequency and cycle of Litecoin with that of Bitcoin, thanks to the supply cap and the adoption of an almost similar anti-inflation supply mechanism in the Bitcoin network.
Litecoin was launched in 2011 by Charlie Lee, a former Google employee. Lee forked and modified the Bitcoin source code to optimize blockchain functionality to improve the security of the payment network.
LTC can be used as a payment method on the blockchain. Litecoin uses the Proof of Work (PoW) consensus mechanism to secure the blockchain through a transaction verification process, and miners who assist in the verification process are rewarded with LTC. LTC prices are updated in real time on Binance.
The maximum supply of LTC tokens is 84 million. As of writing, its circulating supply is 73,489,389.
Litecoin uses a proof-of-work consensus mechanism (POW), where miners need to solve a complex math problem to win the chance to validate transactions and create blocks. These miners receive mining rewards for their efforts.
With each halving, the mining reward is reduced by 50% to slow down the creation of new coins. For example, after the second halving in August 2019, the mining reward was reduced from 25 LTC to 12.5 LTC.
Litecoin uses a proof-of-work (PoW) algorithm called Scrypt to perform network consensus and verification. After applying this algorithm, miners need to solve complex math problems to add new blocks to the blockchain and verify transactions. Once a block is verified, it is added to the existing blockchain, and all nodes on the network must reach a consensus on the new version of the blockchain. Under this consensus mechanism, any change to the blockchain must be agreed upon by the majority of nodes, which can resist attacks and ensure network security.
Litecoin uses a similar architecture to Bitcoin, but has greatly improved transaction speed, which makes it stand out. It is one of the first altcoins created by forking Bitcoin and uses the Scrypt algorithm instead of Bitcoin's SHA-256 algorithm.
Litecoin was developed from a branch of the Bitcoin network and therefore uses Bitcoin's source code. However, Litecoin differs from Bitcoin in some aspects, including transaction processing speed, transaction fees, and privacy.
Litecoin can process 54 transactions per second, while the Bitcoin network can only process 5 transactions per second. Due to the speed of transactions, each new block on the Litecoin network takes only 2.5 minutes to generate, while Bitcoin takes 10 minutes.
Litecoin transaction fees are also relatively lower than Bitcoin. Additionally, after the MimbleWimble upgrade, Litecoin offers greater privacy and scalability than Bitcoin.
Please check out our Litecoin price prediction page to get your price target. The data shown here is based on user-provided information and does not represent Binance's views.
Users can buy LTC directly from Binance using a debit or credit card, and can also use LTC to trade other cryptocurrencies on the Binance exchange.
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