Litecoin Hits Market Capitalization of $4.43 Billion (LTC)

Litecoin (LTC) traded down 3% against the US dollar during the 1-day period ending at 18:00 PM Eastern on August 11th. During the last seven days, Litecoin has traded 6.7% lower against the US dollar. One Litecoin coin can currently be bought for $59.21 or 0.00100736 BTC on major exchanges. Litecoin has a market capitalization of $4.43 billion and approximately $228.53 million worth of Litecoin was traded on exchanges in the last day.

Here’s how other cryptocurrencies have performed during the last day:

• Dogecoin (DOGE) traded down 4.5% against the dollar and now trades at $0.10 or 0.00000171 BTC.
• UNUS SED LEO (LEO) traded up 0.2% against the dollar and now trades at $5.81 or 0.00009892 BTC.
• NyanCoin (NYAN) traded down 2.2% against the dollar and now trades at $2.40 or 0.00008809 BTC.
• MegaCoin (MEC) traded down 2.2% against the dollar and now trades at $4.30 or 0.00015776 BTC.
• Polymath (POLY) traded up 21.6% against the dollar and now trades at $0.0926 or 0.00000158 BTC.
• Lotto (LOTTO) traded 2.1% lower against the dollar and now trades at $0.0005 or 0.00000002 BTC.
• DEI (DEI) traded down 2.5% against the dollar and now trades at $0.0129 or 0.00000020 BTC.

About Litecoin

Litecoin (CRYPTO:LTC) is a proof-of-work (PoW) coin that uses the Scrypt hashing algorithm. Its launch date was October 13th, 2011. Litecoin’s total supply is 84,000,000 coins and its circulating supply is 74,851,275 coins. The Reddit community for Litecoin is https://reddit.com/r/litecoin and the currency’s Github account can be viewed here. The official website for Litecoin is litecoin.org. Litecoin’s official Twitter account is @litecoin and its Facebook page is accessible here. Litecoin’s official message board is litecointalk.io.

According to CryptoCompare, “What is Litecoin (LTC)?Litecoin (LTC) is widely seen as the first successful alternative cryptocurrency (altcoin). It was created back in 2011 as a fork of Bitcoin, and features near-zero cost peer-to-peer transactions.It differs from the flagship cryptocurrency in a number of ways, however, with reduced transaction confirmation times, lower fees, a larger maximum supply of 84 million LTC, and other different technical aspects.LTC is often referred to as the “silver to Bitcoin’s gold,” and just like BTC it runs on an open-source blockchain that isn’t controlled by any central authority. It can be mined through a Proof-of-Work consensus algorithm, with miners being rewarded for adding new blocks to the blockchain. Its mining algorithm initially attempted to reduce the effectiveness of specialized mining equipment, but it was unsuccessful in doing so.Just like Bitcoin, Litecoin undergoes halving events, in which the coinbase reward for miners who find blocks on the network is halved.Who Created LTC?The cryptocurrency was created by former Google engineer Charlie Lee, who referred to it as a “lite version of Bitcoin” at one point. Lee is a computer scientist and a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who worked at Google before creating the cryptocurrency.After creating Litecoin, Lee went on to work as Director of Engineering at cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase. Since taking up the role, Lee largely stopped focusing on Litecoin’s development, although the community kept supporting the cryptocurrency.In late 2017, Lee left Coinbase to work on developing Litecoin full-time. Now, he serves as the managing director of a non-profit organization dedicated to LTC, the Litecoin Foundation.Why Does Litecoin Have Value?Litecoin, like Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, has a finite supply and periodically reduces the amount of LTC entering the system, ensuring its inflation is transparent and predictable. Traders have relied on Litecoin as an alternative to Bitcoin which has managed to remain popular throughout the years.Litecoin is nowadays used to pay for goods and services through various payment processors. Because it’s less popular than Bitcoin and has several other changes made to it, LTC transactions are relatively cheap and settle faster.The cryptocurrency is often also used as a testing ground for new technologies before they are implemented on the Bitcoin network. Litecoin was first to implement Segregated Witness (SegWit), which “segregates” a transaction’s digital signature data (the witness) outside of it to use limited block space better, even though the technology was first proposed for Bitcoin.LTC also implemented the Lightning Network, a layer-two scaling solution, before Bitcoin. Many used Litecoin’s Lightning Network to test the network, which relies on user-generated payment channels, in a real economic environment. The first Lightning Network transactions using LTC transferred 0.00000001 LTC from Zurich to San Francisco in under one second.Blockchain data provided by: Blockchair (Main Source), CryptoID (Backup), and WhatToMine (Block Time only)”

Buying and Selling Litecoin

Investors seeking to acquire Litecoin using U.S. dollars directly can do so using GDAX, Coinbase or Changelly.

LTC/USD price chart by TradingView