How much is Litecoin worth?
$60.94
for 1 LTC, in US dollars
Above is the price of exactly one litecoin in US dollars, tracked live.
▲ +4.17%+$2.45 in the last 24 hours
Updated 08:36 UTC
- Rank by market cap
- #23
- Market cap
- $4.73B
- In circulation
- 77.72M LTC of 84M
- All-time high
- $410.26 (9 May 2021)
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Bitcoin’s younger sibling
Litecoin was released in October 2011 by Charlie Lee, then an engineer at Google. He started from Bitcoin’s own source code and changed a handful of settings, aiming for a coin that confirmed payments faster. It is one of the oldest cryptocurrencies still in everyday use, and it has long been described as silver to Bitcoin’s gold.
Litecoin has also served as a proving ground for ideas that later reached Bitcoin. It switched on an upgrade called Segregated Witness in May 2017, a few months ahead of Bitcoin, and smaller, cheaper transactions followed on both chains. In 2022 it added MimbleWimble Extension Blocks, an optional feature that lets users keep transaction amounts private.
What Lee changed
- Quicker blocks: a new block about every 2.5 minutes, against Bitcoin’s 10.
- Four times the coins: a cap of 84 million LTC instead of 21 million.
- A different mining puzzle: Litecoin uses an algorithm called Scrypt, so machines built to mine bitcoin can’t mine it.
The rest will feel familiar to anyone who knows Bitcoin. New coins are mined, there’s a fixed limit, and the block reward is cut in half on a set schedule.
Halvings, Litecoin style
Litecoin’s reward halves every 840,000 blocks. At 2.5 minutes a block, that comes to about once every four years, the same rhythm as Bitcoin. The most recent halving was in August 2023, which cut the reward to 6.25 LTC per block; the earlier ones were in 2015 and 2019.
So far 77.72M LTC have been mined, out of the 84 million that will ever exist. You can set that against Bitcoin’s progress on our page about how many bitcoin are left.
Comparing the price with bitcoin
Since Litecoin has four times Bitcoin’s maximum supply, you might guess that one LTC should cost about a quarter of one BTC. It doesn’t work that way, because the two networks have very different total market values, and price per coin is simply that total divided by the coins in circulation. One litecoin currently sells for $60.94, and the converter above works out the value of any fraction or multiple of that.
Like bitcoin, litecoin divides into 100 million smaller units, so you never need to buy a whole coin. Bitcoin’s version of that unit is the satoshi.
Questions people ask
Who created Litecoin?
Charlie Lee, a former Google engineer, launched it in October 2011 using Bitcoin’s code as the starting point.
How many litecoin will there ever be?
84 million. That limit is written into the software, in the same way Bitcoin’s 21 million is.
When is the next Litecoin halving?
Halvings come every 840,000 blocks, roughly four years apart. The last one was in August 2023, so the next is due about four years after that.
What was Litecoin’s highest price?
Litecoin’s all-time high is $410.26, reached on 9 May 2021.