Litecoin (CRYPTO: LTC), which was launched in Oct. 2011, started trading at $0.30 per token.
It reached an all-time high of $412.96 in May 2021, but it now trades at about $54
A $1,000 investment in its first trade would have grown to $1.38 million before shrinking back to about $180,000 today. That 17,900% gain is still impressive, but some investors might think Litecoin is losing ground to leading cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC). Let’s see why it’s still relevant in today’s crypto market — and where it might head over the next few years.
What sets Litecoin apart from other cryptocurrencies? Charlie Lee, a software engineer at Alphabet’s Google, created Litecoin by forking Bitcoin’s open source code and tweaking a few parameters. Lee accelerated Litecoin’s block time (the average time it takes to verify transactions and generate a new block on the blockchain) to 2.5 minutes, compared to Bitcoin’s 10 minutes.