Litecoin is a blockchain, a shared record of who owns what, kept by many independent computers instead of by one company. It started in October 2011 as a copy of Bitcoin's code with a few settings changed, and its own supporters have long called it the silver to Bitcoin's gold. It was created by Charlie Lee, a former Google engineer.

Litecoin does one job: it moves LTC, its coin, from one person to another. It is money, not a platform. There are no apps running on it the way there are on Ethereum or Solana, and it was never built to host them.

The computers that keep the record are called miners. They compete to add each new batch of transactions, and the winner is paid in newly created LTC plus the small fees users attach. Think of it as a toll road where the road crew is paid mostly by the government printing new money, and only a little by the tolls.

Litecoin also runs MWEB, an optional feature that lets people move LTC privately. That feature is where both of its 2026 security incidents happened.

LTC has one purpose: to be spent or held as money. It is not a share in anything. There is no company behind it collecting revenue, no foundation taking a cut, and no plan to pay holders.

That shapes everything below. A holder of LTC is not owed any part of what the network earns, because the network does not earn anything that flows back to them. What a holder owns is a share of a fixed supply, and the bet is that people will want that supply as money in the future.

The supply is capped at 84 million LTC by the software itself. Every coin that has ever existed was paid to a miner. No team, investor or foundation received an allocation at the start. That is rare in this market, and it counts in Litecoin's favour.

So the question for a holder is simple. Will enough people want to use or hold LTC as money to support the price, when nothing else about it produces income?

Every Litecoin transaction carries a small fee. Over the most recent 90 days, those fees ran at a pace of $143,080 a year. That is the network's whole income.

It used to be much larger. During the 2017 crypto boom, Litecoin users paid $2.5 million in fees in a single year, about the same again in 2018, and $1.2 million in the 2021 boom. Since 2022 the yearly total has settled between roughly $330,000 and $460,000, and 2026 is running well below that. On a typical day this year, fees come to about $434.

Put another way, Litecoin now takes in about what a single small café takes in, spread across a network worth billions.

The public record has a hole: no fees were recorded from 28 October to 30 December 2025. The yearly figures here are what was recorded, and the 90-day pace comes from a complete window.

Miners keep Litecoin running, and they are paid two ways: in new coins and in fees. The two are not close.

Over the past year the network created 1,317,010 new LTC, worth about $66.8 million at the June 2026 price of $50.71. Fees ran at about $143,000 a year. New coins pay about 467 times more than fees do, so almost the entire cost of securing the network is paid by printing.

That printing has a schedule. Every four years the reward is cut in half, which Litecoin calls a halving. The last one was in August 2023 and the next is expected in 2027. Each halving cuts miners' main income by half, and unless fees grow to fill the gap, the network has less money to pay the people who secure it.

For you, it means new supply adds about 1.7% a year to the coins in circulation, a rate that halves every four years. The fees you pay go to miners, not to holders, and the chain burns nothing.

Litecoin will never have more than 84 million coins. The limit is written into the software and has held since 2011.

By September 2026, 77,645,876 LTC had been created, 92.4% of the cap. The first 42 million came in the first four years. The next 21 million took four more. Each four-year stretch since has added half as much as the one before, which is why the last 7.6% will take decades to arrive.

Every one of those coins went to a miner for adding a block. None was set aside for a founder, investors or a treasury, so there is no insider pile waiting to be sold into the market. It is like a mine where everything dug up was paid to the diggers, and nobody kept a share of the ground.

For you, supply is not the risk here. The risk is whether demand for the coins holds up.

Litecoin had two security incidents in 2026, both in MWEB, its private-transfer feature.

In March, an attacker used a flaw to create 85,034 LTC that should not have existed. A scan caught it on 19 March, miners froze the coins, and the attacker returned them in exchange for an 850 LTC bounty. The Litecoin Foundation says no confirmed user funds were lost.

On 25 April, someone tried the same trick again. Updated software rejected it, but miners who had not updated kept building on the bad version of the record for 13 blocks, about half an hour, before it was thrown out. That undid the invalid transfers on Litecoin itself, but two outside services had already paid out against them: NEAR Intents swapped 11,000 LTC for bitcoin and THORChain swapped 10 LTC, and those losses were not reversed. Fixes followed in April, May, August and September.

For you, the system held in the end, and it was fixed in the open. But its record now includes two exploits of a core feature in one year.

On chains like Ethereum, people deposit money into programs for lending and trading. That total, called total value locked, or TVL, is one measure of how much a chain is used.

Litecoin's figure is tiny. It peaked at $7.1 million on 14 March 2024 and stood at $999,462 on 23 September 2026. And none of it belongs to anything built on Litecoin itself. All of it sits in two outside services, THORChain and BoringDAO, that connect Litecoin to other chains.

That is what you would expect from a chain built only to move money. It also means there is no second source of activity or fees behind the coin. Everything rides on LTC being used and held as money.

In June 2026 the market valued all LTC at $3.92 billion, the 30th largest coin. Fees are running at $143,080 a year. The price is about 27,370 times what the network earns in a year.

In everyday terms, that is like paying $27,370 for a vending machine that takes in one dollar a year. The price is from June and the fees are from September, so treat the comparison as approximate.

For money, that is not the whole story. People do not buy gold for its earnings either. But gold has thousands of years of demand behind it, and LTC's price rests on people continuing to choose it as money over Bitcoin and the coins that came later.