Litecoin ranks #15 of 504 cryptocurrencies. On a list that also counts tokens, memecoins, wrapped coins, staked derivatives and stablecoins it appears at #23: 8 of the 22 assets ahead of it are not native coins but tokens or claims. A token is issued on a host blockchain rather than running its own; a claim stands for an asset already counted. Of the 15 non-native assets CoinSpectrum lists above it by market cap, 11 are claims on other assets and 4 are tokens.
| CoinSpectrum Grade | A+ · 87/100 · provisional |
|---|---|
| Rank among cryptocurrencies | #15 |
| Rank counting claims | #23 |
| Market capitalisation | $4.6B |
| Price | $59.10 |
| Circulating supply | 77,765,455 LTC |
| Maximum supply | 84,000,000 LTC |
| Consensus family | Proof of Work |
| Consensus mechanism | Scrypt |
| Own hashrate | 2.72 PH/s |
| Network purpose | Payments |
| Ledger type | Single-asset ledger |
| Launch distribution | No premine |
| Regulatory class | Commodity |
Market figures from the 28 October 2026 build. Open the live view for every exchange's price, and charts.
A+ — 87 out of 100, provisional (from 19 of 20 criteria, 28 October 2026 build). With what is not yet measured anywhere from nothing to full marks, the score would be 83 to 88 (A+ to A+).
| Criterion | Score | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Leading Consensus Mechanisms (Source) | 10 | group average |
| Consensus: leader ladder | 10 | Proof of work: 10 of 10 on the ladder of consensus families ranked by their largest chain's market cap |
| Consensus: family ladder | 10 | Proof of work: 10 of 10 on the ladder of families ranked by the combined market cap of their chains |
| Cryptocurrency Standards (Source) | 8.6 | group average, 12 of 13 measured |
| Sound Money Qualities (6 checks) | 8.3 | 5 of 6 points source |
| Scarcity: a fixed cap that holds, and a supply near 21 million | 9.6 | fixed maximum supply of 84 million: supply scale 9.2, cap 10 |
| Durability: five years or more with no halt, freeze or reversal | ✓ | 15 full years since genesis, no halt, freeze or reversal in five years |
| Fungibility: every unit interchangeable, none the protocol can freeze or set apart | ✓ | no authority can freeze, blacklist or set apart a coin |
| Divisibility: the smallest unit worth a cent or less | ✓ | 8 decimal places, the smallest unit worth $5.9e-7 |
| Portability: fees of a cent or less and capacity for real demand | ✗ | typical fee $0.00045; about 47 transactions a second (3.5 on the throughput scale; 5 is the busiest networks' median demand) |
| Verifiability: open-source nodes and checking without a trusted server | ✓ | node software open source; light clients verify from headers or proofs |
| Privacy (5 checks) | 6 | 3 of 5 passed source |
| Whitepaper privacy: keys are not tied to an identity | ✓ | Anyone can generate keys and receive and send coins; the consensus rules carry no identity check. |
| UTXO ledger: a new key for each payment, no account linking every coin | ✓ | |
| Network-level privacy: the node hides where a transaction came from (Dandelion++, Tor or I2P, on by default) | ✗ | Litecoin Core relays transactions directly; Tor is optional configuration. |
| Hidden amounts (confidential transactions, RingCT, shielded pools, Mimblewimble) | ✓ | MWEB extension block (Litecoin Core 0.21.2, activated May 2022): Mimblewimble hides amounts; optional. |
| Hidden sender and receiver (ring signatures or zero-knowledge proofs, one-time or stealth addresses) | ✗ | MWEB gives receivers stealth addresses (LIP-0004), but spent outputs are not hidden by ring signatures or ZK proofs. |
| Scalability (fees, throughput, block time, block space, features) | 7.4 | average of 5 parts source |
| Fees ($0.001 or less 10, $1 or more 0) | 10 | typical fee $0.00045 |
| Throughput (2,478 a second, the busiest network's peak day, 10; 119, the median of the ten busiest, 5) | 3.5 | about 47 simple transactions a second |
| Block time (10 minutes 10, less either side) | 7.8 | a block every 2.5 minutes |
| Block space per 10 minutes (32 MB or more 10) | 8.8 | 4 MB limit, 16 MB per 10 minutes |
| Features (3 checks) | 6.7 | 2 of 3 passed |
| Payments safe to accept within seconds | ✗ | 2.5-minute blocks, and Litecoin Core (Bitcoin Core 0.21 base) relays BIP125 opt-in replace-by-fee, so zero-confirmation is not network-protected. |
| Pruned nodes: a full node can validate and drop old history | ✓ | Litecoin Core -prune deletes old blocks and keeps the UTXO set. |
| Light clients verify payments from headers or proofs, without a trusted server | ✓ | Bitcoin-style SPV with headers and Merkle proofs. |
| Security (miner pay and 7 checks) | 7.2 | 7.2 of 9 points source |
| Miners paid a day ($1,000 0, $10 million or more 10), 2 points | 5.8 | about $212,760 a day |
| Its own hashrate: at least half its algorithm's largest, not merge-mined | ✓ | |
| Largest pool or validator under 50% | ✓ | 33.8% |
| Largest three under 75% | ✓ | 73.5% |
| More than one maintained client | ✗ | 1 |
| Node software is open source | ✓ | A small group of maintainers under litecoin-project, some funded by Litecoin Foundation grants; no company approves protocol changes. |
| Real on-chain use: 1,000+ transactions a day | ✓ | about 162,900 a day |
| No 51% attack or deep reorganisation in five years | ✓ | |
| Programmability (tokens, contracts, 5 checks) | 4.4 | 4 of 9 points source |
| Token issuance through a metaprotocol | 1 | Ordinals-Lite/LTC-20: read by indexers, not validated by the chain's nodes |
| Smart contracts: scripting for spending conditions | 1 | Bitcoin-derived Script limited to spending conditions; MWEB adds confidential transfers, not programmability. |
| Multisig and time locks | ✓ | P2SH multisig plus CLTV (BIP 65, block 918,684) and CSV (block 1,201,536). |
| Atomic swaps with other chains | ✓ | HTLCs in standard Script; Garden runs Litecoin HTLC swaps. |
| An exchange built into the protocol | ✗ | No exchange in the protocol. |
| Cross-chain messaging the chain verifies itself | ✗ | No protocol messaging to other chains. |
| Non-fungible tokens | ✗ | No token type in consensus; LTC-20 and Ordinals are inscriptions read by indexers. |
| Decentralisation | 10 | section average, 7 of 8 measured |
| Censorship resistant (Source) | 10 | No authority can halt the chain or freeze funds: No party can freeze or claw back coins; no halts on record. source |
| No central team (Source) | 10 | No central team: A small group of maintainers under litecoin-project, some funded by Litecoin Foundation grants; no company approves protocol changes. source |
| Who can mint (Source) | 10 | Proof of work: 10 of 10 on the ladder of who produces blocks |
| Nodes (Source) | 9.7 | 816 reachable nodes (source: Blockchair) |
| Holder concentration (Source) | — | Not yet measured |
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 10 | Fair launch: no premine |
| Fundraising | 10 | No sale of the coin |
| Developer share (after launch) | 10 | No developer share: every new coin goes to the miners who produce blocks |
| Supply & Demand | 8.8 | group average |
| Supply & Demand (Source) | 8.3 | average of 6 measures |
| Exchanges (10 or more: 10) | 10 | 45 exchanges |
| Daily volume ($10K 0, $1B or more 10) | 7.9 | $95,668,736 traded in 24 hours; #37 by volume on the exchanges the site reads (scored on the median day of the last 30, $86,530,620) |
| Turnover (volume ÷ market cap, 5% a day: 10) | 7.7 | 1.8% of its market cap a day, median of the last 30 days |
| Order-book depth (bids and asks within 2% ÷ market cap, 1%: 10) | 7.9 | $10,776,715 within 2% of the price on 9 exchanges, 0.23% of its market cap, median of the last 2 days; a lower bound: the books returned by 1 of them stop short of 2% |
| Market cap ($1M 0, $10B or more 10) | 9.2 | $4.6B, 9.2 on a scale of 2.5 points per tenfold |
| Paper trading (futures, options and margin ÷ market cap, 0%: 10, 100%: 0) | 7.1 | futures, options and margin positions 8.6% of its market cap |
| Supply (smaller is better) | 9.2 | fixed maximum supply of 84 million |
| Record | 8.3 | group average |
| Record (origin, claims, halts) | 10 | 3 positive, 0 negative source |
| Positive record | ||
| Launched with a stated purpose, not as a joke | ✓ | |
| No claims by its founders that contradict its own design | ✓ | |
| No halt, freeze or reversal in five years | ✓ | |
| Age (years since genesis) (Source) | 10 | 15 full years since genesis. Genesis block mined 7 October 2011. |
| Development (work, improvements, unfixed issues) | 5 | 2 positive, 2 negative source |
| Positive | ||
| Steady work, 6 of 6 | ✓ | 287 commits in 12 of the last 12 months (github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin); litecoin-project/litecoin v0.21.5.8, 2026-09-12; 5 releases in 24 months. |
| Shipped a security fix in two years, +1 | ✓ | Litecoin Core 0.21.5.4, 25 Apr 2026: MWEB consensus fix after the Mar 2026 exploit. |
| Negative | ||
| Unfixed vulnerability, disclosed 2024-09-18, −1 | ✗ | CVE-2019-25220: a long low-difficulty header chain can exhaust memory because the node has no headers pre-synchronisation; still in Litecoin v0.21.5.8. |
| Exploit of the chain, 2026-04-25, −1 | ✗ | Attackers used a zero-day bug in the MWEB privacy layer, which older mining nodes accepted, to peg out invalid LTC to third-party DEXs and knock major mining pools offline; the network replaced 13 blocks (3,095,930-3,095,943) to undo the invalid transactions. |
Twenty criteria, weighted equally. The Cryptocurrency Standards have six sections: sound money qualities (six checks: scarcity, durability, fungibility, divisibility, portability, verifiability), privacy (five checks), scalability (four measures and three features), security (miner pay and seven checks), programmability (token issuance, smart contracts and five checks) and decentralisation (censorship resistance, no central team, who can mint, nodes, holders, premine, fundraising and developer share). Provisional: criteria marked — are not yet measured and are left out of the average. A rating of structure and market depth, not a price forecast or investment advice. How the grade is built · Highest-graded cryptocurrencies.
77,765,455 of a maximum 84,000,000 LTC are in circulation — 92.6% of the total that will ever exist.
| Nodes or validators | 816 |
|---|
Litecoin is secured by 2.72 PH/s of its own work. Hashrate does not compare across algorithms — a SHA-256 hash and a Scrypt hash cost different amounts to produce.
Named a digital commodity in the joint SEC-CFTC interpretation (Mar 17, 2026).
The regulator's position, reported as stated, not CoinSpectrum's. Assets nobody has ruled on are left unclassified rather than sorted by a guess.
Litecoin is #15 among cryptocurrencies and #23 in the market ranking, which lists wrapped coins, staked derivatives, stablecoins and tokens alongside them. CoinSpectrum counts an asset once, and counts only cryptocurrencies: assets with their own blockchain and their own consensus. A wrapped coin, a staked derivative or a stablecoin is a claim on something already counted; a token, memecoin or otherwise, runs on another chain's blocks. All of them are listed, each in its own section, and none is added to the total. The 8 places between Litecoin's two ranks are held by claims and tokens, not by other networks. The methodology sets out the rule and the counting rule argues for it.
The price above is the median of the exchanges the site reads live, checked every minute and cross-checked against a market snapshot (how market data is gathered). The grade is scored on published criteria, each with its source (the method). The site is independent, nothing on it is a paid placement, and its statements are signed (about CoinSpectrum, the manifesto).
See the 1 wrapped and staked claim on Litecoin →