Litecoin: The 2.5-Minute Payment Coin Born From Bitcoin’s Code
Proof of work since 2011, with a cap of 84 million coins
Litecoin (LTC) was created in 2011 by former Google engineer Charlie Lee, starting from Bitcoin’s code. Because its blocks come faster, it has long been called ‘silver to Bitcoin’s gold’.
1. Charlie Lee’s ‘lighter Bitcoin’
Litecoin was released in October 2011 as an open-source project and is run not by a company but by miners, developers and node operators around the world. The Litecoin Foundation, a Singapore-based non-profit led by Charlie Lee, supports its development and outreach.
In December 2017 Lee said he had sold or donated almost all his LTC to avoid a conflict of interest, since his comments could move the price. Litecoin keeps merging changes from Bitcoin Core, so the two chains remain very similar under the hood.
2. Scrypt mining, 2.5-minute blocks, halvings
Like Bitcoin, Litecoin uses proof of work, in which miners compete with computing power to make blocks, but with the Scrypt algorithm instead of SHA-256. A block arrives about every 2.5 minutes, four times as often as Bitcoin’s ten, and supply is capped at 84 million coins, four times Bitcoin’s.
The mining reward halves every 840,000 blocks, roughly every four years, and the latest halving was in August 2023. Since 2014 Litecoin has been merge-mined with Dogecoin, so the same work secures both chains and the two networks share part of their mining security.
3. A testing ground, and MWEB
Litecoin has often adopted new technology before Bitcoin. It activated SegWit, an upgrade that separates signature data to save block space, in May 2017, ahead of Bitcoin, and test payments over the Lightning Network, a fast payment layer outside the blockchain, followed that year.
In May 2022 it activated MWEB (MimbleWimble Extension Blocks), which lets users who opt in send confidential transactions that hide amounts. In October 2025 a spot Litecoin ETF began trading in the United States. On the Crypto Nation map, LTC is the city-hall tower of Litecoin City, as the native coin of its own chain.
4. Things to know: privacy, regulation, competition
Privacy features such as MWEB protect users but are awkward for exchanges bound by anti-money-laundering rules. After MWEB arrived, some exchanges reviewed their Litecoin support, and some do not accept deposits or withdrawals of coins hidden with MWEB.
Litecoin began as a payments coin, but in payments it now competes with stablecoins and faster chains, and its simple scripting keeps DeFi and token activity small. Like other proof-of-work coins, it also faces the concentration of mining hardware and hash power in a few manufacturers and large pools.
Written from information public up to October 2026. It does not recommend or rate any coin and is not investment advice. If something is wrong, please tell us through the contact page.