Litecoin LTC
Rank #25 by market cap
Last 7 days
▼5.50%What Litecoin is
Litecoin was launched in 2011 by Charlie Lee, a former Google engineer, as one of the earliest Bitcoin forks. It kept Bitcoin's fundamental design and changed a few parameters: blocks every 2.5 minutes rather than 10, a supply cap of 84 million, and the Scrypt mining algorithm instead of SHA-256.
For years it was positioned as "silver to Bitcoin's gold" — the faster, cheaper everyday counterpart — and it has run continuously for over a decade without a serious security incident, which is a genuine achievement.
The difficulty is differentiation. The problems Litecoin solved in 2011 have since been addressed elsewhere: Bitcoin's Lightning Network handles fast cheap payments, and countless chains offer lower fees. Its MimbleWimble extension blocks added optional privacy in 2022 but saw limited adoption. Litecoin today is reliable, liquid and widely supported, without a clear answer to what it uniquely does that its alternatives do not.
About the asset
Litecoin has no token contract — it is the native asset of its own chain, not a token issued on someone else's.
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Litecoin data synced 3m ago from CoinGecko. Figures shown in USD. This page is market information, not financial advice — and nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell LTC.