Is Litecoin dead? What the chain shows in 2026

01 · The questionIs anyone still using Litecoin?

Litecoin is one of the oldest coins still trading. One LTC sold for $415 at its peak. At the end of September it sold for $67.

Charlie Lee launched Litecoin in October 2011 as a lighter, faster copy of Bitcoin. A new block lands every few minutes instead of every ten, and fees are a fraction of a cent. Only 84 million LTC will ever exist. It was built for paying for things, cheaper and quicker than bitcoin.

So is Litecoin dead? Bitquery indexes every Litecoin block, so we read all of them, up to the end of September. It is the same test we ran on Cardano and Algorand. We counted active addresses and payments, traced coins in and out of the private pool, sorted every block by who mined it and worked out the balance of every address.

The chain is alive and still busier than its old rivals. But daily use is the lowest in almost three years. A private pool added in 2022 has taken in far more coins, and in March a bug in it paid out money that never existed. And most of what miners earn for securing Litecoin now comes from a different coin, Dogecoin.

02 · UseFewer addresses, still the busiest of the old coins

The simplest test is how many addresses use the chain. We count an address as active on a day it sends or receives LTC. Last month Litecoin averaged about 260,000 active addresses per day.

That is the lowest month since October 2023, and 26% below the start of last year. The tall spike at the end of that year came with a craze for inscriptions, small files such as images or tokens written into a transaction. Once that craze faded the next year, use fell. It has kept falling every year since.

An address is not a person. Most Litecoin wallets and exchanges use a new address for each payment, so one person can show up many times in a month. Last month 83% of the addresses we saw had never been used before. That share has stayed between 80% and 89% for five years, so it tells you how the wallets work rather than how many people joined.

A steadier guide is the addresses that keep coming back. We counted the ones active on 5 or more days in a month. There were about 180,000 last month, down by about a third since the start of last year.

Busy is relative, though. Dogecoin and Dash are the other old payment coins in the same database, and we counted all three the same way. Litecoin carried 6.8 times as many transactions as Dogecoin last month, and Dash was smaller again.

03 · PaymentsSmall payments, tiny fees

What fills those blocks is mostly payments, nearly all of them small. A typical Litecoin transaction pays someone and sends the rest back to the payer as change. We left the change out and sorted every payment by what it was worth in dollars at the time.

Last month the chain carried about 170,000 of these payments per day. That is more than it carried in early 2022, when LTC traded at about twice today's price. Most of them were worth less than $100. These are the payments Litecoin was built for, and they have held up better than the address counts.

Sending them costs almost nothing. The median fee, the one in the middle when every fee is lined up, was 0.05 cents. For the person paying, that is close to free. All the fees paid on Litecoin last month came to about $14,000.

Cheap fees also drew the inscription craze, the same trick that filled Bitcoin's blocks. On Litecoin it peaked over the 2023 holidays: in December and January, about 35% of all transactions created an inscription. Across the whole craze, inscriptions paid about $27,000 in fees. They added a lot of traffic and almost no pay for miners.

04 · The private poolLitecoin MWEB grew 21-fold

In May 2022 Litecoin added MWEB, short for Mimblewimble Extension Blocks. It works like a private side pool. Coins moved in with a peg-in drop out of public view. Inside, amounts and addresses stay hidden until someone moves coins back out with a peg-out.

Privacy cost Litecoin some listings. That June, five big South Korean exchanges, Upbit, Bithumb, Coinone, Korbit and Gopax, dropped LTC and cited a Korean rule against anonymous transfers.

The pool's total is still public, because every block ends with one transaction that holds all of it. For its first year and a half the pool stayed small. Then it took off. By mid-September it held 21 times as much LTC as at the end of 2023.

Even at its peak the pool held under 1% of all LTC. On Zcash, the best-known coin with a private pool, 29% of all coins sit out of view.

One week, three years ago, shows how much a single user can move. Over four days at the end of May, the pool grew more than twentyfold to 365,000 LTC, much of it in lots of roughly the same size from new addresses. Days later, three withdrawals took about 588,000 LTC out, more than the pool had held at its high, because another large deposit came in between them. The pool was back near where it started. Roughly $50 million left the pool in two days.

This year the pool is busier and more spread out. Deposits came from about 28,000 different addresses, and roughly as much LTC came out as went in.

From May to September, 291 withdrawals were exactly 2,000 LTC each. Almost every one went to a brand-new address and then, usually through one more new address, into the same wallet. The ones that had arrived there by the end of September made up 29% of everything taken out of MWEB this year.

That wallet behaves like an exchange hot wallet, the account an exchange uses to take deposits and pay out withdrawals. It has paid out withdrawals on almost every day since November 2025. The chunks from MWEB were 28% of everything it received from other addresses. Our labels do not name it, and MWEB hides who put those coins into the pool in the first place.

05 · The bugThe 85,034 LTC that were never there

Nobody outside can check what happens inside the pool, so everyone relies on the code that guards it. In March that code had a gap. The Litecoin developers' postmortem says block checks skipped a test on MWEB inputs, so a withdrawal could claim more than its input held. The developers found the hole two days after it was first used.

On the evening of 17 March, one block paid out about 85,000 LTC. The developers say the input behind it was really worth less than two LTC.

Because the coins inside the pool are hidden, a fake withdrawal does not leave a gap in anyone's balance that others can see. The only public sign is that the pool's total drops.

Sixteen minutes later, the coins were split three ways. Eight days later, one transaction sent almost all of them back to the developers and kept 850 LTC as a bounty the two sides had agreed on. Two and a half hours after that, the full amount went back into the pool, the returned coins plus a separate payment that made up the difference.

A second attacker used the same bug in late April. For a while a chain of blocks carrying the bad withdrawal grew longer than the valid one. Updated miners then overtook it, and the network threw away 13 blocks, an event called a reorg. NEAR Intents, a cross-chain swap service later hit by a different theft, lost 11,000 LTC it had accepted in the discarded blocks. On the valid chain those blocks took almost three hours to mine, against the usual half hour.

06 · MiningWho mines Litecoin, and who pays them

That April chain split was settled by miners, who add the blocks and get paid in new coins plus fees. Most of them work through mining pools, which share out the pay among many machines, and each pool writes its name into the blocks it mines. Three pools, F2Pool, ViaBTC and AntPool, mined 78% of Litecoin's blocks from July to September. F2Pool and ViaBTC alone mined more than half.

That matters because whoever controls most of the mining power decides which transactions go into blocks, and in what order.

The same machines also mine Dogecoin. Both coins use the same mining puzzle, called Scrypt, so a miner can work on both at once and claim a block on either chain. This is called merged mining, and almost every Litecoin block carries the mark it leaves.

Dogecoin now pays far better. Last month 85% of what these miners earned came from Dogecoin blocks, and Litecoin's fees barely registered. Dogecoin has paid more every month for more than five years.

Litecoin hashrate, the computing power aimed at the chain, has tripled in under three years, even as Litecoin's own block pay in dollars fell. It peaked last November and is now about a quarter lower. The rise points to Dogecoin's rewards paying for much of Litecoin's security.

The next Litecoin halving

About every four years, Litecoin's block reward halves. The last one was in August 2023. The next is due around July 2027, and it will cut the reward to half of what it is today. Dogecoin's reward never halves, so its share of miners' pay should rise again after the next one.

07 · HoldersWho holds Litecoin

We worked out the balance of every Litecoin address at the end of September. Nearly a million addresses held at least 1 LTC, and the largest 100 held 42% of all coins.

Exchanges hold a big part of it. Addresses that exchanges publish as proof of their reserves hold about 14% of the supply, led by Binance and OKX. That is a floor, since most exchange wallets carry no label.

The biggest new holder has no name. Last December, 27 fresh addresses received 6.9 million LTC, about 9% of all Litecoin, and none of them has sent a coin since. The coins came from thousands of smaller addresses, mostly in batches of about 36,000 LTC. That is how an exchange sweeps customer deposits into cold storage, the wallets it keeps offline, but our labels do not say which exchange it is.

Two public holders cannot be found this way. Lite Strategy, a Nasdaq-listed company that buys LTC for its treasury, reported its holdings as of the end of June, with the coins managed by GSR. The Canary Litecoin ETF reported its own on the same date, held with Coinbase Custody and BitGo. Neither can be picked out from the chain alone.

Anyone can repeat these balance counts, since every Litecoin transaction outside MWEB is public. Our Litecoin API guide shows how to look up any address. For a backtest or an audit, the full Litecoin history is also sold as files, every block and transaction since the first one.

The coins themselves move a lot. Only 18% of the supply sits on addresses that last sent coins, or first received them, before 2022. About two thirds has moved in the past two years.

08 · The answerSo, is Litecoin dead?

No. Litecoin still settles a steady stream of small payments for fees nobody notices, and it carries 4.5 times as many transactions as Dogecoin and Dash combined.

But it is shrinking, and it leans on others. Daily use is the lowest in almost three years. Dogecoin blocks pay miners several times what Litecoin's do, and the next halving will widen that gap. The largest new holders are exchange wallets our labels cannot name. And in March its private pool paid out coins that did not exist.

Litecoin is alive as a payments chain. Fewer addresses use it each year, and the money that keeps it secure now comes mostly from Dogecoin.

09 · The recordAddresses behind this story

FAQ

Is Litecoin dead?

No. Litecoin still carries several times as many transactions as Dogecoin and settles a steady stream of small payments. It is quieter than it was, though, and daily use is the lowest since October 2023.

What is Litecoin used for?

Mostly small payments. Most payments on the chain are worth less than $100, and the fee for each is a fraction of a cent. People also use MWEB, the private pool, to move coins out of public view, and exchanges move large sums between their own wallets.

How long does a Litecoin transaction take?

A new Litecoin block arrives about every two and a half minutes, so a payment is usually in a block within a few minutes. Fees are low enough that a transaction rarely has to wait for room in a block.

When is the next Litecoin halving?

The next halving is due around July 2027. It will cut the reward miners get for each Litecoin block in half, as every halving has done since the first one.

How much Litecoin does the Litecoin ETF hold?

The Canary Litecoin ETF, a US fund that holds LTC itself rather than futures, reported 126,930 LTC at the end of June. Its coins are held with Coinbase Custody and BitGo.

What is Litecoin MWEB?

MWEB, short for Mimblewimble Extension Blocks, is a private pool added to Litecoin four years ago. Coins moved into it hide their amounts and addresses until someone moves them out. Its highest end-of-day total, in September, was about 564,000 LTC.

Who mines Litecoin?

Mining pools. F2Pool, ViaBTC and AntPool mined 78% of Litecoin's blocks from July to September. Almost every block is mined together with Dogecoin, which now pays miners far more.

How many people use Litecoin?

Nobody can count people, only addresses, and wallets use a fresh address for most payments. The steadiest measure is the addresses that come back on several days a month, and that count has fallen by about a third since the start of last year.