CoinShares, a leading provider of crypto research and pioneering crypto investment products (such as “Bitcoin Tracker One”, which is an exchange-traded note listed on NASDAQ QMX), recently released a research report called “Asset Highlight: Litecoin”. Here are some of the highlights from this report:

  • The coin that Charlie Lee created before Litecoin was Fairbrix, which was “a fork of Tenebrix, itself a fork of Multicoin, itself a fork of Bitcoin.”
  • “Lee released the Litecoin source code on GitHub 7 October 2011… The exact launch time was set to 13 October at 03:00 GMT by popular vote in order to ensure fairness and facilitate maximum immediate participation by the mining community… The launch proceeded without any major issues and Litecoin went live with a genesis block that included the text: ‘NY Times 05/Oct/2011 Steve Jobs, Apple’s Visionary, Dies at 56’.”
  • “The Litecoin reference client is called Litecoin Core and features all ‘full node’ capabilities including complete download and validation of the Litecoin blockchain, all protocol rules and wallet functionality.”
  • “The Litecoin Foundation serves a political and industrial lobbying function organisationally separate from, but intellectually related to, Litecoin Core. It is a non-profit organisation located in Singapore…”
  • “Like most altcoins, Litecoin was forked from the Bitcoin source code with relatively minor modifications to change a few key attributes… The few actual differences between the two relate mainly to block generation times, coin issuance and the mining algorithm. Litecoin block generation times are targeted at 2.5 minutes instead of the 10-minute block generation target used by Bitcoin. The idea behind the modification was to allow for 4x faster confirmation times than Bitcoin.”
  • “Even though the block generation target is 4x that of Bitcoin, the block reward remains the same, starting at LTC 50 per block. However, Litecoin block rewards are cut in half every 840,000 blocks, as opposed to every 210,000 blocks in Bitcoin. As a result, the Litecoin inflation schedule plays out over the same length as Bitcoin (~130 years), but the total number of Litecoins will be 4x that of Bitcoin: a total of LTC ~84MM.”
  • “… Litecoin can therefore be seen as a high-value real-life testnet for new and groundbreaking cryptocurrency technology, and while this does come with a unique set of risks, it also provides the ability for Litecoin to maintain a position at the bleeding edge of cryptocurrency development.”
  • “Already by spring 2017, as the first major coin, Litecoin implemented the Segregated Witness (SegWit) transaction structure. This update fixes the transaction malleability bug and thereby opens the door for a whole range of exciting features relying on chained multisignature transactions.”
  • “One of the most promising features enabled by SegWit is The Lightning Network… As one of the first protocols to adopt SegWit, Litecoin is supremely placed to benefit from early Lightning implementations. Moreover, due to its close compatibility with Bitcoin, Litecoin’s Lightning Network will be fully interoperable with Bitcoin’s Lightning Network.”

You can download the full copy of this report from the CoinShares websites (from the top-level header menu, choose Research, and then to download any of the research reports, you just need to enter your name and email address).

Featured Image Coutesy of CoinShares