What is Litecoin (LTC)
Litecoin is one of the longest-standing crypto-assets on the market: it has existed since 2011 and is considered the first altcoin ever created. Its blockchain was designed as a more scalable alternative to Bitcoin, with blocks generated faster and therefore quicker transactions: Litecoin creates a block in about 2.5 minutes, against Bitcoin’s roughly 10.
Like Bitcoin, it has a capped maximum supply: no more than 84 million LTC will ever be issued. The network uses a Proof of Work consensus mechanism and is secured by miners through mining.
How it began: silver alongside Bitcoin’s gold
Litecoin was created in 2011 by Charlie Lee, a computer engineer who left his job at Google to focus on the project. The idea was to support micro-transactions and create a crypto-asset representing silver, alongside the gold represented by Bitcoin. In November 2013 the project reached a market capitalisation of over one billion dollars.
For this reason Litecoin is often described as a “clone” of Bitcoin, built from its same source code but with the ambition of overcoming some of its limits in terms of scalability and transaction-validation speed. More than ten years after its creation, the network continues to operate steadily.
Price trends and what to consider
Like all crypto-assets, LTC has shown a highly volatile price trend. Among the elements that mark its history is the halving of August 2023, which reduced the per-block miner reward from 12.5 to 6.25 LTC, slowing the rate of new token issuance. Historically, LTC’s quotations show some correlation with those of Bitcoin.
Past performance is not a guarantee of future results.
Litecoin Market Data
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