Litecoin price and where to buy LTC

What is Litecoin?

Litecoin is a proof-of-work cryptocurrency that started as a lighter, faster version of Bitcoin. It uses the same basic design, a public ledger secured by miners, with three deliberate changes: blocks every 2.5 minutes instead of 10, the Scrypt mining algorithm instead of SHA-256, and a supply cap of 84 million coins instead of 21 million.

Faster blocks mean a payment gets its first confirmation sooner, and fees are usually a small fraction of Bitcoin’s. It is one of the oldest cryptocurrencies still actively traded, which is why every exchange we track lists it.

How to buy Litecoin, step by step

1. Pick an exchange that lists LTC. Every exchange we track does. Compare fees, funding options and whether it serves your country in our exchange reviews.
2. Create and verify your account. Regulated exchanges ask for identity documents before you can deposit fiat.
3. Fund the account. A bank transfer or a stablecoin deposit usually costs far less than a card payment.
4. Buy LTC. Use the LTC/USD or LTC/USDT market. A market order fills at once at the best available price; a limit order waits for the price you set.
5. Decide where to keep it. Leaving LTC on the exchange is simplest, but the exchange then holds your coins. Withdrawing to a Litecoin wallet you control removes that risk and adds a network fee, usually a small fraction of a dollar.

Where to buy Litecoin at the best price

Once you have an account, the cheapest place to buy LTC is whichever venue in the table above is marked cheapest, after you add its trading fee. The ranking moves during the day, so a venue that was cheapest this morning may not be now.

Three things decide what you really pay:

• The price on that venue. The table shows every dollar-quoted market we track, with its gap to our composite.
• The trading fee. Spot fees differ by venue and by how you pay. Our fee comparison lists them side by side.
• How you fund the account. Card purchases often cost several percent more than a bank transfer or a stablecoin deposit, which dwarfs the price gap between exchanges.

Why the Litecoin price differs between exchanges

Litecoin trades on separate order books, and nothing forces them to agree to the cent. In our minute-by-minute measurement the gap between the highest and lowest venue averaged about 0.06 percent. Bitcoin, the deepest market we track, averaged about 0.025 percent over the same period.

LTC’s wider gap is what a smaller market looks like: fewer traders arbitraging the difference, and thinner books that move further on each order. It widened past half a percent in under one minute out of every two hundred we measured. The spread figure at the top of this page is that measurement, live. Our guide on why crypto prices differ between exchanges explains the mechanism.

What moves the Litecoin price

Mostly the rest of the crypto market. Over the last few hundred hours of our composite, Litecoin’s hourly moves were about twice the size of Bitcoin’s, and the two moved together with a correlation of about 0.5, where 1 would mean identical moves and 0 no relationship at all.

Litecoin-specific drivers exist too: the halving, which cuts new supply, and listings or delistings on large venues. Leverage matters in both directions; the funding rates above show whether traders are currently paying to be long or short.

Pros and cons of Litecoin

Pros

• Blocks every 2.5 minutes and low network fees make it practical for payments.
• A long track record: one of the oldest cryptocurrencies still running.
• Listed on every exchange we track, with enough volume to price it continuously.
• A fixed 84 million supply with a known halving schedule.

Cons

• A far smaller market than Bitcoin, and its price has stayed far below its all-time high.
• Its price moves about twice as much as Bitcoin’s hour to hour in our data.
• Prices differ between exchanges about two and a half times as much as Bitcoin’s in our measurement.
• No general-purpose smart contracts, so fewer applications run on it than on smart-contract chains.

How the Litecoin halving works

Every 840,000 blocks, about every four years, the reward miners receive for a new Litecoin block halves. It started at 50 LTC and now pays 6.25 LTC per block. The next halving cuts it to 3.125 LTC.

A halving slows the rate at which new coins appear, not the number that already exist. Whether that moves the price is a question for the market; what the halving changes mechanically is how much new LTC miners have to sell to cover their costs.

Litecoin and Bitcoin compared

Both halve roughly every four years. Litecoin moves value faster and cheaper; Bitcoin has the far larger market, which is why its price agrees more closely across exchanges. If you need a figure in another currency, the LTC to USD converter applies our live price to any amount.