Know Your Crypto — Litecoin Edition: Everything You Need To Know About This Awesome Token

You might have observed that Litecoin has always been quite consistent. Here is everything you need to know about the highly popular altcoin — Litecoin!

Right at the time when everybody thought that its an “endgame” for Litecoin, the popular altcoin witnessed a huge gain of 6.02% in the last 24H, putting its price at $61.07 as of writing. So, is it a good investment option. This article is going to cover everything you need to about Litecoin, how it originated, and how it stayed consistent for so long.

Names like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana are easy to spot on crypto headlines. Because they are popular and offers good investment returns? No! That’s because tokens like BTC and ETH are so volatile — with severely high prices — that crypto enthusiasts like myself love to discuss about it. However, one token that has always kept itself low-key is the first altcoin — Litecoin. Yes! Litecoin isn’t just the most popular altcoin — but it’s also the first altcoin too. While Bitcoin has long been considered the gold equivalent of cryptocurrencies, Litecoin isn’t anything less than the silver.

One Quick Introduction To Litecoin

Launched in 2011. Litecoin is a decentralized currency developed by the former Google employee Charlee Lee. The inception of Bitcoin — as an open-source software offered developers with the opportunity to fork its original code, tweak, and add whatever feature they wanted. That’s exactly what Lee did. Although Bitcoin had started maturing for just three years, the flagship crypto was already being bogged down by pestering problems — the most constant among them were long transactional times and mining conglomerates that started to surface in those recent years.

Litecoin Is The Same As Bitcoin — But Uniquely Different

Recognising these issues, Lee came up with Litecoin, with the first issue addressed being transaction times. While the Bitcoin network processes transactions every 10 minutes, Litecoin trimmed it by 4x and brought just under 2.5 minutes. This magnitude of improvement enabled the network to handle higher transaction volume while scaling at an unprecedented rate. Litecoin also stretched the max volume of tokens to 84 million, 71,083,668 of which are in current circulation. This number is already four times as much of Bitcoin, added that mining is also very efficient.

While it may seem that Litecoin could very soon run out of new tokens with 90% of its max volume already minted, analysts predict that it could possibly happen in the year 2142. Sounds crazy? But there’s a very simple answer. Stay tuned to find out. The second major improvement is mining efficiency. While Bitcoin was hardcoded to utilise the processor-intensive SHA-256 algorithm, Litecoin makes use of a memory-intensive Scrypt algorithm. This has also restricted miners to deploy custom-built FPGA and ASIC devices — that are not your typical CPUs or GPUs in devices.

Underrated Champ or Overrated Hype — Litecoin as an Investment Option

Over the past decade, there had been constant doubts and confusion about Litecoin as a good investment option. But still, Litecoin has always been the favourite to investors. To start with, the Litecoin platform boasts transaction times that are four times faster than that of Bitcoin. Added that they are much cheaper — $0.026 for Litecoin and about $4.38 for Bitcoin — there’s a reason why the altcoin has been gaining traction. Although, higher competition has dethroned Litecoin from #10 to #21 (according to CoinMarketCap), Litecoin has longevity that others don’t have.

Litecoin formally entered the market in April 2013 with a price of $4.30. However, it quickly dropped to $1.50 and didn’t witness as much fluctuation in the recent years. However, with a steady growth curve, it began soaring in the market competitively in 2017. Now — five years later — Litecoin is sitting at $61.07 (as of writing) with a marketcap of $4,289,185,374. Keep in mind that Litecoin still follows the same philosophy as Bitcoin, therefore, you should pay close attention to what Bitcoin is doing. Afterall, it’s always the “darkest before dawn” and it’s true for crypto too.

The Bottom Line

With lower volatility than the majority of cryptos and efficiencies that Bitcoin failed to address, Litecoin could very well be a smart investment option for long-term investors. But as of now, the Litecoin platform is yet to witness a few important innovations — as opposed to Ethereum and Solana — which can definitely spike its value even higher.

Non-Financial Advice: The data, resources, and statistics in this article have been consolidated from multiple sources and neither the author nor the site is responsible for any financial profit/loss incurred from the data and opinions present in this article. Readers understand that all risks associated with cryptocurrency are taken on by themselves.