Litecoin Price Tracker (LTC) & Whale Tracker

What is Litecoin

Litecoin is one of the oldest cryptocurrencies still in wide use. Charlie Lee, then a Google engineer, released it in October 2011 as a lighter version of Bitcoin, with faster blocks and a different mining algorithm, and described it as silver to Bitcoin's gold. The network has run without a serious outage since, which is why it remains listed on almost every exchange and accepted by most crypto payment processors.

Litecoin's purpose is payments. Blocks arrive every two and a half minutes instead of ten, fees are typically a few cents, and the chain has handled every bull market's transaction surge without the fee spikes Bitcoin saw in 2017 and 2021. The native coin is LTC, and the live price, market cap and supply figures sit at the top of this page.

The Litecoin Foundation, a Singapore-based non-profit, funds development and promotion. Charlie Lee sold or donated all of his LTC in December 2017 to remove any conflict of interest, a decision that drew criticism at the time but kept him involved as a developer rather than a holder.

How Litecoin works

Litecoin is a proof-of-work chain, like Bitcoin, but uses the Scrypt hashing algorithm instead of SHA-256. Scrypt was chosen because it was memory-hard and resistant to the specialised mining chips of the time. ASIC miners for Scrypt arrived anyway, and today Litecoin is mined almost entirely by the same industrial operations that mine Dogecoin, because the two chains share merged mining and miners earn both coins for the same work.

The codebase tracks Bitcoin closely and Litecoin has often adopted upgrades first. It activated Segregated Witness in May 2017, months before Bitcoin, and in May 2022 it added MWEB, Mimblewimble Extension Blocks, an opt-in privacy feature that lets users move coins into a side ledger where amounts and addresses are hidden. MWEB caused some South Korean exchanges to delist LTC, though most of the world's venues kept it.

Litecoin also serves as a testing ground for Bitcoin: features such as the Lightning Network ran on Litecoin early, and atomic swaps between the two chains were demonstrated in 2017.

Supply and tokenomics

Litecoin's supply is capped at 84 million coins, exactly four times Bitcoin's 21 million. The block reward halves every 840,000 blocks, roughly every four years. It started at 50 LTC, fell to 25 in 2015, 12.5 in 2019 and 6.25 in August 2023. The next halving is expected in mid-2027. More than 85 percent of all litecoin has been mined.

There is no staking, no treasury and no foundation allocation baked into the protocol; all new coins come from mining. Miners sell most of what they earn to cover electricity, so Litecoin's issuance is a steady source of selling pressure that the halvings reduce over time. The circulating supply shown above rises by the block reward every two and a half minutes.

History and milestones

Litecoin was one of the first coins listed on Coinbase, in 2017, which cemented its status as a mainstream asset. Its price peaked near 375 dollars in December 2017 and again above 400 dollars in May 2021. The 2018 announcement of a partnership with a retail bank called LitePay collapsed within weeks and remains a cautionary tale.

In 2021 the Litecoin Foundation launched a Visa debit card with BlockFi, and payment processors including BitPay, CoinGate and NOWPayments report that LTC is consistently among the top coins used for actual purchases. Litecoin has avoided contentious hard forks for its entire history, and the chain has never been rolled back. In 2025 US asset managers filed for spot Litecoin exchange-traded funds, citing its long track record and the regulator's view of it as a commodity.

Where to buy and trade Litecoin

LTC is listed on Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, OKX, Bybit, Bitstamp and nearly every other exchange, with pairs against the dollar, euro and major stablecoins. Liquidity is deep for an asset of its size because it has been traded continuously for well over a decade. Exchange-traded products tracking LTC exist in Europe and on Canadian exchanges.

Self-custody options include Litewallet, the Litecoin Foundation's app, and multi-coin wallets such as Exodus, Trust Wallet and Ledger hardware devices. If you plan to use MWEB privacy features, check that your wallet supports them, since many exchanges will not accept deposits sent from the extension block side of the chain.

What people use Litecoin for

Litecoin's niche is moving value cheaply and reliably. Merchants that accept crypto through BitPay, CoinGate or Coinbase Commerce see LTC among the most used coins, partly because fees stay low when Bitcoin's spike. Exchanges use it as a cheap transfer rail: sending LTC between two venues costs cents and confirms in minutes, which is why arbitrage traders and remittance users keep it in their toolkit.

It also plays a quiet role as a hedge against protocol risk. Litecoin's code is a conservative fork of Bitcoin's, it has never been rolled back, and the chain has run for well over a decade without a halt. For holders who want proof-of-work exposure beyond Bitcoin without betting on a new technology, that track record is the product.

Risks to understand

Litecoin has few of the smart-contract use cases that drive activity on Ethereum or Solana, and its daily transaction count has been flat for years. Its value depends on continued acceptance as a payment coin and on its reputation as a stable, boring asset, which is a real but narrow niche. Price moves tend to follow Bitcoin with higher volatility.

Mining is concentrated in a few large pools, and the merged-mining link to Dogecoin means Litecoin's security depends partly on Dogecoin's economics. Privacy features bring delisting risk in strict jurisdictions. As with every page on this site, the guide is a reference, not investment advice.

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