According to Charlie Lee, creator of Litecoin, the long waited halving of block rewards for miners has finally happened and was a success.
Block 168,000 produced 12.5 LTC in block rewards and the price hit back $100 for the first time since 22nd July.
Just like Bitcoin, the fourth cryptocurrency per market cap, undergoes the halving process every 4 years, with the next happening in 2023 now.
Mining reward this time is cut from 25 to 12.5 Litecoin per block and Lee is claiming that “We are mining at a rate of a block every 1.4 minutes on average, which is much faster than the expected 2.5 minutes.”
The first and only previous halving was accomplished in August 2015. On that occasion, the price went parabolic one month before to touch $8.7 while during the actual halving it dropped back down to $3.54.
This time around we saw Litecoin rising all the way from $24 in December 2018 to $146 on 22nd June 2019, marking an impressive 500% gain in only 6 months.
Based on data going back to the previous halving then, the coin price is now supposed to drop considerably but we know by experience that nothing is a given in crypto and anything can happen.
As it stands, the currency is still on an uptrend with a current price of $99.60 at the time of writing. Most will depend on what Bitcoin will be doing in the next few days.
It’s worth remembering that Litecoin that is considered the Silver Bitcoin, comes from the same blockchain as Bitcoin as it was a fork of the Bitcoin Core client differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time, the increased maximum number of coins, different hashing algorithm using scrypt, instead of SHA-256. Other than that, they are strictly connected together.
In May 2017, Litecoin became the first of the top 5 (by market cap) cryptocurrencies to adopt Segregated Witness. Later in May of the same year, the first Lightning Network transaction was completed through Litecoin, transferring 0.00000001 LTC from Zürich to San Francisco in under one second.
The coin acts as a background testing platform for Bitcoin as all the different features of the Bitcoin protocol are tested on the Litecoin network first.
It also reached its all-time high at the same time all the other coins in the market did too, on 19th December 2017 when it hit $375.29.
