Litecoin (LTC) is a cryptocurrency created in 2011 by Charlie Lee, a former Google engineer, to address concerns about Bitcoin’s centralization and make it harder for large-scale mining firms to dominate the market. Initially designed to be inaccessible to the growing network of application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) miners, Litecoin was released in 2014 as an open-source global payment network.


Mining Litecoin requires joining a mining pool, which pays out rewards based on the share of work your miner does. In 2024, the best way to mine Litecoin is by purchasing one or more ASIC miners compatible with Scrypt. Buying and selling Litecoin can be done on various exchanges, including Coinbase, eToro, Kraken, Binance.US, Robinhood, and Gemini.


Litecoin has a total coin cap of 84 million and uses the Scrypt hashing algorithm. It has a capacity for up to 50 transactions per second, a block time of 2.5 minutes, and rewards halves every 840,000 blocks. The halving schedule for LTC differs from Bitcoin’s because it was released two years later.


The future of Litecoin depends on its maintenance, relevance, and meeting the needs of users and investors. As of May 2024, Litecoin was still being maintained by a community of developers with fixes and improvements. In 2024, it activated Runes, similar to non-fungible tokens on the Bitcoin blockchain. It had a market price of over $80, a 24-hour trading volume of about $310 million, and a market cap of $6 billion.


However, it is difficult to predict LTC’s market value in five years due to its popularity and how individuals and investors use it.