8 years ago today the Litecoin Network was publicly launched on Thursday Oct 13 at 03:00 GMT. Earlier this week we celebrated Litecoin’s Genesis which marks the day the first Litecoin block was mined to the network, it contains a message which reads:

“@NY Times 05/Oct/2011 Steve Jobs, Apple’s Visionary, Dies at 56"

Two further blocks were subsequently mined to confirm this ‘genesis was valid’ and the network client and binaries were published ahead of time:

“People had time to compile the source and run the client on their machines against the Litecoin testnet. So people were able to make sure everything was working well before the launch.”

All that was needed for the network to launch was the release of the genesis hash. The exact date and time of the release of this hash was put to a poll posted on the 9th October 2011 entitled ‘When should Litecoin be launched?’ to ensure the community got its say and to ensure fairness at launch.

“We wanted to be fair so there are 4 options that are 6 hours apart spanning the 24 hours in a day. Vote for the the time most convenient to you.”

Out of 91 participants the largest block of 39 people voted for Thursday Oct 13, 03:00 GMT, and so it was decided. One minute ahead of time Litecoin’s founder Charlie Lee publicly released the genesis hash to the bitcoin talk forums and Litecoin Officially began.

block_nTime=1317972665 block_nNonce=2084524493

The level of user interest had been greatly underestimated and due to a low mining difficulty blocks were initally being mined every 10–20 seconds rather than the planned 2.5 minutes. This was soon resolved however over the next couple of days as the difficulty adjusted to the high hash-rate.

Fast forward 8 years later and the network, now valued at over $3.5bn is still going stronger than ever. Earlier this year we saw a new All time high in terms of network hash-rate and earlier this week we also reported that Litecoin is 2019s second best performing large market capped crypto asset along side bitcoin, up 90% YTD despite the wider space being in a bear market.

A lot has happened in 8 years, we have seen two major bull market cycles that have propelled crypto to the forefront of public consciousness and new technologies such as Segwit, Lightning and MimbleWimble emerge advancing the usability and prospects of the space.

While we don’t know what the future holds, we will be right there along side you for the journey and look forward to every moment of it.

Happy Birthday Litecoin.