Update (October 2026): This article was written in July 2019, before Litecoin’s second halving. That halving took place on August 5, 2019 and cut the block reward from 25 to 12.5 LTC. The third followed on August 2, 2023, and miners have received 6.25 LTC per block since then. The next halving, at block 3,360,000, is expected in the second half of 2027 (Forklog).
Litecoin (LTC), one of the oldest and most popular cryptocurrencies in the market, experienced its second halving on August 5, 2019. Many analysts and reports were talking about it, but what does halving mean? How can this affect Litecoin price? How often do halving events take place? These and more questions are going to be answered in this article.
Litecoin Halving Explained
There are different virtual currencies in the market that operate with different consensus algorithms. One of them is known as Proof-of-Work (PoW), also made popular by Bitcoin (BTC). PoW networks such as BTC and LTC, require miners to process the transactions of the network by providing mining power.
This is achieved with hardware devices that consume large amounts of energy and that maintain the network secure. By confirming the transactions are real and have not been altered, miners earn rewards for their energy consumption and time required to mine these digital assets.
In July 2019, Litecoin miners received 25 LTC coins per block, compared to BTC miners that received 12.5 BTC per block. Every 840,000 blocks on the Litecoin network and 210,000 on the Bitcoin blockchain, the rewards for miners get reduced by half. That meant that after the August 2019 halving, Litecoin miners were rewarded with 12.5 LTC every 2.5 minutes, and after the May 2020 halving, Bitcoin miners received 6.25 BTC every 10 minutes, considering Litecoin block times are four times faster than Bitcoin’s blocks.
Is Litecoin Price Going To Be Affected?
Bitcoin and Litecoin are currencies with an inflationary scheme that gets reduced every four years. The 2019 halving reduced Litecoin inflation from 8.72% per year to 4.26% per year, closer to what central banks around the world normally establish as a “healthy inflation rate” for their economies.
Cryptocurrencies are different. There is a clear limited supply that cannot be changed, creating certainty about what is going to happen and how inflation rates are going to evolve. With a lower issuance of LTC per month, the market has fewer new coins to absorb, although that alone does not raise the price.
As virtual currencies expand, the demand for them increases. During the last years, there has been a growing demand from larger investors and institutions, compared to previous years when digital currencies were mainly traded by retail investors. Interest in Litecoin was expected to grow as well, and a lower issuance of LTC was expected to affect the price of what was then the fourth-largest cryptocurrency.
By 2019, Bitcoin had experienced two halvings, in 2012 and 2016, and the next one took place in May 2020. Before and after the first two halvings, the price of the popular digital asset followed a positive trend.
There is a difference with Litecoin. The digital currency was released to the market just in 2011, which means that in 2019 the cryptocurrency was experiencing its second halving event rather than the third. Thus, evaluating the impact on the asset was more difficult than with Bitcoin. Despite that, Litecoin was expected to behave in a similar way to Bitcoin, even when LTC didn’t perform well after the first halving experience in 2015.
On August 25, 2015, Litecoin experienced its first halving event in which miners started receiving 25 LTC rather than 50 LTC as it was since 2011. The charts show that the digital asset had a price of 306% one month before the halving, which was certainly driven by the fact that the market was excited about this event.
Nonetheless, euphoria ended in just a few weeks and Litecoin’s price remained unchanged for over 1 year, being traded around $2.73 and $4.7 with a short period in which LTC surged above that level and hit $5.7.
In 2019, Litecoin started a bull run in December 2018, after a bear market that lasted for a year. By July 2019, it had grown 550% from its bottom, which suggested that the halving had already been priced in. The price action that we have seen in these six months is similar to the one that the price followed in 2015 when it surged over 600% from $1.18 to $8.79.
Although PoW currencies tend to behave with a lower correlation to other digital assets when they experience a halving, Litecoin was expected to behave somewhat in line with the whole crypto market. That meant that, to a lower extent, bullishness or bearishness in the space would have an impact on the digital currency before and after the halving event on August 5, 2019.
At UseTheBitcoin we have written an article about Litecoin price prediction that was made taking into account different events, including Litecoin’s halvings.
At the time of writing, on July 25, 2019, we were 11 days away from the halving event. Litecoin had a price of $95.55 and a market capitalization of over $6 billion, according to data provided by CoinMarketCap.
Litecoin Supply And Hash Rate
Litecoin has a maximum supply of 84,000,000 LTC. In July 2019, over 62,840,000 LTC, or 75% of the total, had been mined. By October 11, 2026, about 77.7 million LTC had been mined, about 92.5% of the total, according to CoinGecko.
Before the 2019 halving, 14,400 LTC were generated per day, from approximately 576 blocks. That halving cut it to 7,200 LTC a day, and the 2023 halving to about 3,600.
In July 2019, Litecoin hash rate also reached new all-time highs with around 300 GH/s. This is why difficulty for mining Litecoin had also increased substantially, reaching new records. Although miners seemed to be bullish about the future of the network, it was clear that they would be less profitable after the halving.
During an interview with Mickey on July 10, Charlie Lee, the founder of Litecoin mentioned that there will be some implications for Litecoin’s mining ecosystem.
On the matter, he commented in the interview, which is now offline:
“When the mining rewards get cut in half, some miners will not be profitable and they will shut off their machine. If a big percentage does that, then blocks will slow down for some time. For litecoin it’s three and a half days before the next change [in difficulty], so possibly like seven days of slower blocks, and then after that, the difficulty will readjust and everything will be fine.”
It is possible to start mining Litecoin by purchasing the necessary equipment and connecting to a mining pool that would offer good services in the jurisdiction the miner is located. Another way to have access to Litecoin is by purchasing it. At UseTheBitcoin we have written where to buy Litecoin and how.
Litecoin Halving Conclusion
Litecoin halved on August 5, 2019. This is one of the most important events experienced by a PoW network. According to what we analyzed in July 2019, the market seemed to have already priced the halving in, which coincided with the recovery in the cryptocurrency space.
Miners did not seem worried about the reward reduction, as they expected the price to grow. If it did not, a short exodus of miners from the network was expected until the difficulty adjusted.
A halving lowers the issuance of new LTC, but it does not guarantee a higher price. LTC traded near $96 on the day of the 2019 halving and near $87 on the day of the 2023 halving, and it was near $64 on October 11, 2026, according to CoinGecko.
