About Litecoin
Litecoin (LTC) is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency launched in October 2011 by former Google engineer Charlie Lee. It is one of the earliest and most established alternatives to Bitcoin, often described as 'silver to Bitcoin's gold'. Built on a fork of the Bitcoin codebase, Litecoin shortened block times to roughly 2.5 minutes, increased the maximum supply to 84 million coins, and adopted the Scrypt proof-of-work algorithm, which was originally more accessible to general-purpose hardware.
Litecoin produces a new block roughly every 2.5 minutes, four times faster than Bitcoin, and undergoes its own halving event every 840,000 blocks (about every four years). The 2022 MWEB (MimbleWimble Extension Blocks) upgrade introduced an opt-in confidential transactions sidechain that allows users to obscure amounts within the LTC network. Litecoin is also commonly merge-mined with Dogecoin, sharing the same Scrypt mining infrastructure.
Litecoin is supported by virtually every major exchange, hardware wallet, and payment processor, and is one of the most commonly accepted cryptocurrencies among merchants. The non-profit Litecoin Foundation coordinates community outreach and protocol research, while the Litecoin Core developer team maintains the open-source reference client. Lightning Network support enables fast, low-cost LTC payments on a second layer.
Crypto Market Watch tracks the live Litecoin price ranked #25 by market capitalisation, 24-hour and 7-day price changes, market capitalisation, trading volume, circulating supply, and all-time highs and lows on this page. Data refreshes continuously throughout the trading day so investors can monitor LTC market activity in real time.
