The Litecoin price is currently $ 46.63 with a 24-hour trading volume of $ 1.48B across 167 exchanges. The LTC price is down -3.89% in the last 24 hours. The Litecoin price prediction sentiment is currently bearish. Litecoin reached its highest price on December 19, 2017, when it was trading at its all-time high of $ 373.02. It has a circulating supply of 65.50M LTC with a total supply of 84.00M LTC. The best exchange for trading Litecoin is Binance.

Litecoin is a very well-established cryptocurrency, as it was one of the very first coins to gain traction after Bitcoin entered the scene in 2009. Litecoin was launched in 2011 by computer scientist Charlie Lee and has been one of the most relevant altcoins for practically its entire existence.

Litecoin was created as a fork of the Bitcoin Core client and still shares many of its defining characteristics with Bitcoin. In the cryptocurrency it is often said that if Bitcoin represents gold, Litecoin represents silver.

Key Litecoin features:

Created by Charlie Lee as a fork of Bitcoin in 2011

Shares many properties with Bitcoin, but enables faster transactions

Uses Scrypt-based PoW instead of SHA256-based PoW

Litecoin’s block time target is four times faster than Bitcoin’s (2.5 minutes compared to 10 minutes). Litecoin’s maximum supply cap is four times larger than Bitcoin’s (84 million compared to 21 million).

Similarly to Bitcoin, the Litecoin blockchain also reaches consensus through a proof-of-work (PoW) mechanism. However, Litecoin doesn’t use a SHA256-based PoW algorithm, but instead uses a Scrypt-based algorithm.

These features allows the Litecoin blockchain to process transactions faster than the Bitcoin blockchain.

Litecoin also has a block reward halving mechanism, which occurs approximately every four years. The latest Litecoin halving, which occurred in 2019, lowered the LTC reward from 25 LTC per block to 12.5 LTC per block.

In general, Litecoin is seen as a faster but less robust alternative to Bitcoin. Due to its comparably faster speed, Litecoin advocates are actively promoting LTC as a cryptocurrency that is convenient for use in everyday transactions.

In the future, Litecoin could potentially have features that would make it much more than Bitcoin’s little brother. For example, Litecoin developers are experimenting with implementing the MimbleWimble privacy technology into Litecoin to enable private LTC transactions.

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