Litecoin’s Hashrate Reaches All-Time High, Difficulty Follows Suit

The blockchain network Litecoin’s computational power reached an all-time high (ATH) on Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2023, at block height 2,411,048, reaching 798.43 terahash per second (TH/s). In addition, Litecoin’s difficulty also reached an all-time high this week, hitting 23,505,031 the following day.

A significant amount of hashrate has been dedicated to the Litecoin (LTC) network over the last 30 days as the blockchain’s computational power climbed 38% higher from 576 terahash per second (TH/s) on Dec. 28, 2022, to the all-time high of 798 TH/s recorded on Jan. 25, 2023. Currently, Litecoin’s hashrate on Jan. 28, 2023, is around 691 TH/s, which is 20% higher than the hashrate last month. Litecoin’s price has also been climbing higher as LTC’s value increased by 34% against the U.S. dollar in the past 30 days.

The all-time high hashrate of 798 terahash per second (TH/s) is roughly 202 TH/s away from a single petahash per second (PH/s), which equates to 0.798 PH/s. Viabtc is the top Litecoin mining pool with 192 TH/s, or 27% of the total Litecoin hashrate. The crypto mining pool Viabtc is followed by F2pool (121 TH/s), Antpool (104 TH/s), Litecoinpool.org (77 TH/s), and Binance (69 TH/s), respectively. All five Litecoin mining pools also participate in dogecoin (DOGE) merge mining through a process called auxiliary proof-of-work (AuxPoW).

Litecoin will be the first of a few proof-of-work (PoW) cryptocurrencies to halve its mining reward, as its network precedes protocols like Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Bitcoinsv (BSV), and Bitcoin (BTC). The LTC network is expected to reduce its reward from 12.5 LTC to 6.25 LTC on or around Aug. 3, 2023. Litecoin’s difficulty increased to 23.50 million on Jan. 26, and it was 3.28% higher over the last three days. Like Bitcoin, Litecoin’s difficulty adjustment occurs every 2,016 blocks, but LTC blocks are discovered at a rate of about 2.5 minutes per block.

This means Litecoin’s difficulty adjustment retargets every three days to keep the block time at a consistent rate. In the last month, the difficulty increased by 14.80%, and it rose 32.41% in the last 90 days. LTC has lost much of its market dominance since its early days, as it was once the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization at the end of Jan. 2014. By the next year, around the same time, it was knocked down to the third-largest cryptocurrency by market cap. In the years following, LTC has gradually dropped to its current 17th position.

Interest in LTC has also dropped since 2013, as data from Google Trends (GT) indicates that, out of a score from 1-100, the search term “Litecoin” reached a score of 6 in 2013. In Dec. 2017, the term reached the highest score of 100, but today the score is half of what it was in 2013, at 3. GT data further shows that the search term “Litecoin” saw a rebound at the end of 2020, and a much larger spike throughout 2021. Most interest in Litecoin comes from Nigeria, the Netherlands, Czechia, the United States, and Slovenia.

What do you think the future holds for the Litecoin network as it approaches its next mining reward halving in August 2023? Share your thoughts and predictions in the comments below.