Litecoin (LTC) Exchange

Litecoin was launched in 2011 as a faster, cheaper counterpart to Bitcoin, using the same basic design with a few parameters changed: blocks every two and a half minutes instead of ten, four times the coin supply, and Scrypt instead of SHA-256 for mining. It has run without a serious outage ever since, which is most of its argument.

In practice that makes it a transfer coin. Fees are a fraction of a cent, confirmations arrive in a couple of minutes, and the network is rarely congested, so moving value between exchanges is cheap and predictable. Many services support it precisely because the transfer cost does not surprise anyone.

Litecoin has often adopted Bitcoin's upgrades early — SegWit arrived here first, and MimbleWimble extension blocks added optional confidential transactions in 2022. Adoption of the private side has been modest, and most balances and transfers remain fully visible.

For swapping it is a practical middle step: liquid on almost every venue, cheap to move, and without the fee spikes that make small Bitcoin transfers awkward.

Practical points for a swap. Litecoin addresses come in legacy form starting with L and native SegWit starting with ltc1, and there is also an older M-prefix format that some services still use. All of them receive, but a few exchanges reject the M format on withdrawal, so if your wallet gives you one and the sending side refuses it, generate a SegWit address instead.

Because blocks arrive every two and a half minutes, a Litecoin transfer usually shows up before you have finished checking the address. Fees stay in fractions of a cent regardless of amount, which makes the coin a practical way to move value between services that both support it.

Litecoin has a quiet advantage for swapping: almost every service supports it, and it has never had a chain split or a rollback that forced anyone to re-check old transfers. When a route between two assets is expensive or unavailable, going through Litecoin is often the cheapest bridge, precisely because both legs are cheap and fast.