Litecoin

Litecoin was created by Charlie Lee in 2011 and Litecoin Core is derived from Bitcoin Core. The Litecoin Foundation is a donation-funded nonprofit with no protocol role. In March 2026 a missing check in the MWEB privacy layer let an attacker create about 85,034 LTC; developers fixed it first with miner-only builds that were not public releases. Public releases followed from 26 April to 12 September 2026, and one soft-fork rule was published only after it had activated. The team responded fast, but the process was opaque.

• Litecoin MWEB Security Incident Postmortem (Litecoin Foundation)
• litecoin-project/litecoin releases
• Litecoin's 13-block reorg wasn't a zero-day, GitHub commit history shows otherwise (CoinDesk)
• Litecoin Foundation: litecoin.com

The Canary Litecoin ETF, a US spot fund on Nasdaq (LTCC), launched in October 2025 and held 126,930 LTC on 30 June 2026, worth about $5.30 million, with Coinbase Custody and BitGo as custodians. Lite Strategy (Nasdaq: LITS) adopted LTC as its main treasury asset after a $100 million raise in July 2025 and reported 929,548 LTC in November 2025. The SEC's 17 March 2026 interpretation names LTC among its examples of digital commodities. ETF assets are still small.

• Canary Litecoin ETF: Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2026
• Canary Capital Launches Canary Litecoin ETF (LTCC) (Canary Capital)
• Lite Strategy Reports First Quarter Fiscal Year 2026 Results (Chainwire)
• Application of the Federal Securities Laws to Certain Types of Crypto Assets (SEC Release Nos. 33-11412; 34-105020)

Litecoin Core caps supply at 84 million LTC. About 77.65 million LTC, or 92.4%, circulated on 27 September 2026. The block subsidy has been 6.25 LTC since the third halving on 2 August 2023 and halves every 840,000 blocks; the next halving, to 3.125 LTC, points to about late July 2027. New LTC goes only to miners; there is no company, treasury or minting right.

• litecoin-project/litecoin: src/amount.h
• litecoin-project/litecoin: src/chainparams.cpp
• CoinGecko API: litecoin
• litecoin-project/litecoin: src/validation.cpp (GetBlockSubsidy)

The chain was at block 3,185,230 on 27 September 2026 with hashrate of about 2.73 PH/s over the prior week. In that week F2Pool, ViaBTC and AntPool mined about 70.4% of blocks. On 25 April 2026 a bug stalled upgraded miners while others built an invalid 13-block chain for over three hours; the 13-block reorganisation hit cross-chain services, with NEAR Intents' exposure put at about $600,000. Data on daily transactions and fees is insufficient.

• litecoinspace.org: mining pools (1 week) API
• litecoinspace.org: tip height API
• Litecoin rewrites three hours of history to undo its first major privacy-layer exploit (The Block)