Litecoin Definition

The blockchain is a shared digital ledger which holds a record of all https://www.ledger.com/ transactions. Recent cryptocurrency transactions are grouped together into ‘blocks’ by miners. The blocks are then cryptographically secured before they get linked to the existing blockchain.

litecoin

This allows you to speculate on its price movements without owning the actual cryptocurrency. Instead, you’re opening a position which will increase or decrease in value depending on litecoin’s price movement against the dollar. Firstly, when you open a leveraged litecoin trade, you aren’t actually taking ownership of any cryptocurrency.

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In the end, he cited conflict of interest as the reason for the sale. The blockchain was created by Charlie Lee, a software engineer who had worked at Google and crypto exchange Coinbase, and it was launched on the bitcointalk forum in October 2011. Speed and low fees should make it attractive for individuals to use Litecoin for peer-to-peer transfers and digital purchases, and for businesses – as a payment system. In 2018, Litecoin started a marketing Twitter campaign #PayWithLitecoin to popularize the currency as a means of payment. Was one of the first altcoins to spring from the Bitcoin protocol. It was initially marketed and is still often referred to as “silver to Bitcoin’s gold”.

  • The Lightning Network is a second-layer technology for bitcoin that uses micropayment channels to scale its blockchain’s capability to conduct transactions.
  • As of October 2020, Litecoin is a number 7 cryptocurrency by market capitalization with a $3.6B market cap (for comparison, Bitcoin’s market cap is $256B).
  • This website includes information about cryptocurrencies, contracts for difference and other financial instruments, and about brokers, exchanges and other entities trading in such instruments.
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  • It shares many similarities with bitcoin and is based on bitcoin’s original source code.

Litecoin customers benefit from faster transaction times, on average every 2.5 minutes and a market cap of close to $9 billion, making it a top cryptocurrency option for mainstream use. Litecoin is a peer to peer payment system providing both a medium of exchange and a store of value. Due to its fast transaction times and secure network, Litecoin is often favoured when making transactions that are time-sensitive, i.e. paying for a coffee or at a restaurant. LTC is widely used by merchants and service providers around the world, and with increased crypto adoption is expected to continue growing. The secured nature of smart contracts helps to make cryptocurrency transactions without the involvement of any central authority.

What Gives Litecoin Its Value?

https://allcoinss.com/ tends to hold value quite well and experience lower volatility as a mature cryptocurrency, especially when compared to meme coins. Litecoin is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency created by Charlie Lee. It was created based on the Bitcoinprotocol but differs in terms of the hashing algorithm used. Litecoin uses the memory intensive Scrypt proof of work mining algorithm.

Litecoin is one of the most prominent altcoins and was created by former Google employee and Director of Engineering atCoinbase, Charlie Lee. Litecoin was the first to alter Bitcoin and the most significant difference is that it takes 2.5 minutes for Litecoin to generate a block, or transaction, in comparison to Bitcoin’s 10 minutes. Litecoin is a cryptocurrency, similar in lots of ways to bitcoin. Charlie Lee, the founder of litecoin, even based it off the older currency’s source code – and said he intended litecoin to be ‘silver to bitcoin’s gold’. Litecoin, like all virtual currencies, is a form of digital money.

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These include white papers, government data, original reporting, and interviews with industry experts. We also reference original research from other reputable publishers where appropriate. You can learn more about the standards we follow in https://allcoinss.com/eu-regulators-reportedly-scrutinize-binance-over-securities-law-compliance/ producing accurate, unbiased content in oureditorial policy. LTC is available on most crypto exchanges (e.g., Binance, Coinbase, Gemini, FTX) against both other cryptos like BTC & ETH, as well as national currencies like dollars and euros.

When it comes to Litecoin as a method of payment, in early days there was correlation to Bitcoin in terms of extended payment patterns. Litecoin uses scrypt in its proof-of-work algorithm, a sequential memory-hard function requiring asymptotically more memory than an algorithm which is not memory-hard. Bitcoin price shows affinity to move higher after the recent surge on March 27.