A Brief History of Litecoin (LTC)

A metallic Litecoin logo against a blue backdrop—ideal for those looking to buy crypto on Coinmama.
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Coinmama recently introduced three new cryptocurrencies to our digital asset lineup as customers can now purchase Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Cardano. All three of these digital currencies are top performing assets within the cryptocurrency economy and we decided to give our users a bit of history on each coin.

The Leading Cryptocurrency Litecoin Comes to Coinmama!

The first coin covered in our series is Litecoin (LTC) one of the earliest cryptocurrencies created in 2011 by the developer Charlie Lee. Litecoin has often been called the ‘silver’ to bitcoin’s ‘gold’ over the years and is a popular cryptocurrency. The virtual currency LTC is a fork of the bitcoin codebase but has a few differences. Block times are 2.5 minutes which makes LTC transactions faster and the protocol uses a different consensus mechanism called ‘scrypt’ rather than the ‘SHA-256’ proof-of-work miners use in Bitcoin. At the moment there are 56 million LTC in circulation and there is a maximum cap of 84 million coins.

LTC has always been a well-known digital asset since it was first released and had reached a $1 billion market capitalization two years after its inception in 2013. For a very long time, LTC was the second and third highest cryptocurrency market valuation. Today Litecoin is the sixth largest market capitalization among 1,600 other cryptocurrencies recorded today. The coin has an $8 billion dollar market valuation, and each LTC today is averaging roughly $146 USD per token.

In May of 2017, LTC adopted the Segregated Witness protocol joining in on bitcoin’s upgrade process that year. That spring the cryptocurrency Litecoin performed its first Lightning Network transaction from Zürich, Germany to San Francisco. Litecoin’s developer Charlie Lee has returned to the development team last year after a brief hiatus working for Coinbase, and the coin has an ambitious roadmap ahead.

Here are a few reasons why cryptocurrency investors like Litecoin (LTC):

  • Speed. Litecoin transactions are faster because of its block time difference of 2.5 minutes as opposed to BTC’s every 10 minutes.
  • Mining. Proponents of Litecoin like the mining distribution method for LTC’s scrypt mining which is believed to be a fairer model.
  • Digital Scarcity and Liquidity. Litecoin has a lot more coins than BTC and in the end, miners will produce 84Mn LTC. This adds both digital scarcity to these tokens while increasing market liquidity.
  • Experimentation. LTC developers have added Segregated Witness and processed Lightning Transactions well before BTC. This being said LTC proponents believe the development team is more willing to test and trial new code.

Coinmama is excited to add Litecoin to our lineup of cryptocurrency choices as the digital asset is a top running virtual currency. So today you can buy LTC today from one of our packages, and get your cryptocurrencies quickly in order to diversify your portfolio.

Check out our LTC packages today priced in USD and EUR!

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