What is Litecoin (LTC)?
Litecoin (LTC) is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency that allows anyone to make payments at fast speed with low costs.
Litecoin was created by Charles Lee, a former Coinbase employee, with the support of many other members of the Bitcoin community. The project officially launched on October 13, 2021, introducing a number of innovative changes based on the Bitcoin protocol.
The most prominent innovation of Litecoin is the Nakamoto consensus, Proof-of-Work (PoW) block validator nodes based on Scrypt instead of SHA-256d. Litecoin reaches a block time of 2.5 minutes, with a total supply of 84 million.
Key Features of Litecoin (LTC)
Segregated Witness (SegWit)
SegWit is an officially approved platform upgrade proposal from May 2017 for Litecoin.
It separates transaction signatures from transaction data, which account for more than 50% of the block size. This protocol increases the number of transactions that can be stored in each block, helping the network to process more transactions per second. As a result, SegWit increases the scalability of the blockchain network based on the Nakamoto consensus, Litecoin.
SegWit also reduce transaction costs. Since transaction fees are derived from the amount of data being processed by a single block, the more transactions stored in a 1MB block, the cheaper the individual transactions will be.
SegWit is a soft-fork that never changes the network’s transaction block size limit. Instead, it added an extension block with an upper limit of 3 megabytes containing only transaction signatures, to a 1 megabyte block containing only transaction data. Nodes can process this new block even without upgrading this protocol.
Lightning Network
Lightning Network is a micropayment solution based on the Bitcoin protocol that enables near-instant and low-cost payments between merchants and consumers using Bitcoin.
When a customer wants to transact with a merchant, both of them need to open a payment channel, which is based on the Bitcoin blockchain. Since the transaction details from this payment channel are not recorded on the blockchain, it is only when the payment channel is closed that the final result of both parties’ wallet balances is updated to the blockchain. Blockchain only serves as a payment layer for Lightning transactions. Transaction parties will pay transaction fees to Bitcoin miners when they decide to close the channel.
One limitation to the Lightning Network is that it requires a person to be online in order to receive transactions involving him or her. Another limitation is that users have to lock a certain amount of fund each time they want to open a payment channel and can only use that amount for channel transactions.
MimbleWimble
MimbleWimble is a security feature that aims to improve privacy and interchangeability while reducing network bloat and improving scalability.
MimbleWimble is based on the UTXO model. However, in MimbleWimble there are no addresses, and UTXO values are encrypted by “fuzzy spots”, a private key known only to the owner of the UTXO. Observers cannot infer any information about the ownership or value of MinbleWimble UTXO.
In the future, Litecoin (LTC) will continue add security features (implementation of the MimbleWimble protocol), support for Schnorr Signatures, and Taproot (a privacy-preserving switchable script feature).
Litecoin (LTC) Specifications
- Symbol: LTC
- Blockchain: Litecoin
- Consensus: Proof of Work (PoW)
- Algorithm: Scrypt
- Token type: Coin, Mineable
- Block time: 2.5 minutes
- Block reward: 50 LTC/block
- Transaction time: 56 TPS
- Total supply: 84,000,000 LTC
- Circulating Supply: 68,751,845.550 LTC
LTC token Price today
How to buy LTC
Litecoin (LTC) has been listed on Attlas Exchange.
Traders can easily and securely buy LTC with lowest fees on Attlas Exchange.
Step 1: Download the app and register an account
Step 2: Select Market on the toolbar at the main screen
Step 3: Select Spot
Step 4: Find LTC
Step 5: Select Buy
Summary
This article is an overview of Litecoin (LTC), not a financial advice.
Users are advised to do their own research before making any trading decisions.