Litecoin Price Today

The current real-time Litecoin price is $71.00 . LTC price has grew by 0.67% in the last day and increased by 7.97% in the last seven days. It’s important to note that the current Litecoin market capitalization is $5,307,313,772. The maximum supply is 84,000,000.00 LTC coins, with a circulating supply of 74,755,656.11. LTC is ranked #20 in terms of market cap.

What Litecoin Is Explained

Litecoin (LTC) is a well-known cryptocurrency project built to facilitate fast, secure, and efficient payments across a decentralized network. Today, the network is commonly used for transferring value between network participants without border issues, purchasing low-value goods and services (due to its low fees), and as a speculative investment. 

Charlie Lee, a proponent of cryptocurrency since its early days, created Litecoin, releasing it in 2011, just months after Bitcoin. Lee developed it to build a faster, cheaper, and more environmentally friendly alternative to Bitcoin. To achieve this goal, Lee created Litecoin through a fork to the Bitcoin network, which changed several of the network’s fundamental properties. 

The Litecoin project is currently managed by the Litecoin Foundation, which develops the cryptocurrency, builds use cases, and promotes the project to a larger audience. Despite selling his Litecoin in 2017 due to a conflict of interests, Charlie Lee serves as the managing director of the Litecoin Foundation and is still heavily active in the project’s development. 

This Is How Litecoin Works 

Charlie Lee, Litecoin’s creator, referred to the asset as ‘the silver to Bitcoin’s gold,’ implying that Litecoin was never meant to replace Bitcoin but to supplement the ecosystem and solve several issues he felt stifled Bitcoin as a payments network. Lee also meant that Litecoin would lessen the hold of large companies in crypto mining, but ultimately, the Litecoin mining landscape would be dominated by enterprise ventures.  

Being a Bitcoin fork, Litecoin naturally uses a modified Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism with a different hashing algorithm for transaction validation. As a PoW asset, Litecoin is dependent on miners for transaction validation. However, in recent times, the average person has been priced out of Litecoin mining, which requires specialized hardware to be efficient.

The Litecoin network is the peer-to-peer blockchain on which transcription data is written and read. LTC is the network’s proprietary token and is used for value transfers and paying transaction fees. It is distributed to validators as mining rewards. 

Litecoin’s Utility

While Litecoin’s goal of putting transaction validation and mining back in the hands of the average person has failed, the project still boasts impressive utility that makes the project a viable alternative to the Bitcoin network in certain circumstances. 

The most significant advantage of the Litecoin network is its low transaction fees. On average, a Litecoin transfer costs just $0.0049 to send. Moreover, Litecoin is faster to send than Bitcoin, boasting a throughput of around 54 Transactions Per Second (TPS) compared to Bitcoin’s 7. Litecoin also offers a fast transaction settlement time of around 150 seconds. 

Similar to Bitcoin, Litecoin regularly undergoes a halving event, reducing rewards for minting a new block. The block reward on the network is currently 6.25 LTC but will reduce to 3.125 LTC by July 2027. 

Litecoin Price History

Litecoin was initially released in 2011 and traded for around $0.30. The project slowly built momentum as more participants joined the crypto market, leading LTC to hit $33.35 in December 2013. However, the asset was unable to maintain its valuation and crumbled, slowly falling to around $5 by August 2014. 

The next few years saw LTC struggle significantly, with the asset falling as low as $1.38 and trading around $3 to $4 until March 2017. Resulting from a bull market surge, Litecoin exploded, climbing around 7,875% by December, hitting $319.26. However, LTC struggled over the next 12 months, as investors sold Litecoin and took profits, dropping to $23.46 by December 2018. 

LTC saw a brief run in 2019, hitting $135.51, before falling back to around $50, where it stayed until late 2020. In 2021, the crypto market exploded, and demand for Litecoin surged, causing LTC to form an all-time high of $345.30 by May 2021.

Since then, Litecoin has struggled. The asset slowly dropped in value alongside the broader crypto market, hovering between $70 and $100 throughout 2023. While the positive market sentiment at the start of 2024 led LTC to hit $109.24, it has since fallen and today trades at $71.00 .